[TYPO3-ect] Your experiences with Smarty

[Ernesto Baschny [cron IT]]

Steffen Kamper wrote: on 08.03.2007 10:16:

>> Hello Ries, Steffen and others,
>>
>> meanwhile you have done some experiments with lib/div and Smarty. I didn't
>> work with it myself. I would like to find an answer to this question:
>>
>> Do we need a Smarty connector object (smartyView)?
>>
>> Maybe Smarty has an API itself that doesn't need a special connector
>> object. Maybe such an object could be of help.
>>
>> What is your experience? What is your vision?

> Ries build up a gallery with lib/div and smarty and we discussed a lot.
> First we moved to rpt_smarty because it's the better ext, later update (but 
> still has to be updated)
> 
> Then smartyView is used as central point for
> - initializing smarty
> - assigning values
> 
> As you mentioned, there are several ways to use smarty, if smarty is 
> initialised, you can assign values from every place.
> But to keep the model of MVC clear and the methods transparent, i would say 
> yes.
> 
> I will do some improvements too and will update the smartyView at WE.

That sounds cool. One feature I would love to see in one "official ECT"
approach with Smarty would be a way for a developer to ship default
Smarty templates, but the smarty class flexible to load templates from a
custom path on demand. So I would configure:

plugin.tx_myplugin.smartyTemplates = fileadmin/tx_myplugin/templates/

The extension developer would ship his extension with:

typo3conf/ext/myplugin/templates/singleView.html
typo3conf/ext/myplugin/templates/listView.html
typo3conf/ext/myplugin/templates/headElement.html
typo3conf/ext/myplugin/templates/....

And I would be able to override any (or none) of those in my own
template directory:

fileadmin/tx_myplugin/headElement.html

This way I can alter just what I need but still use the extensions
templates. It is always a pain in the ass if I have a "all or nothing"
template like in sr_feuser_register: If I need a minor customization
there, I need to copy the ENTIRE template over to fileadmin, and will
probably miss new features introduced in later releases when I upgrade.

I have done this in my own (non-TYPO3) project that use Smarty by using
"register_resource" and then overwriting _fetch_template_info to change
the default from fetching single files to searching for them in a
"search path". Maybe there is an easier way nowadays with smarty (this
was done some yeeeears ago already).

What do you think?

Cheers,
Ernesto