In Detail 

Smarty is a templating engine for PHP. Designers who are used to working with HTML files can work with Smarty templates, which are HTML files with simple tags while programmers work with the underlying PHP code. The Smarty engine brings the code and templates together. The result of all this is that designers can concentrate on designing, programmers can concentrate on programming, and they don't need to get in each others way so much.

Even if you are developing a site on your own, Smarty is a powerful way to make your code clearer to you and others, as well as easier to debug and modify later.

What you will learn from this book 

This book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of using Smarty. It will help you to:

• Install and configure Smarty on your Web server
• Understand how Smarty affects your web site architecture, and build site foundations that make the most of what Smarty offers
• Designers will learn to work with templates that contain variables and logic, to modify layouts or content of Smarty web sites
• See how Smarty caching can improve the performance of your sites
• Develop custom Smarty functions and plug-ins to incorporate into your templates.

Approach

Using a step-by-step approach based on realistic examples, the expert authors show you how to use Smarty in your own PHP development.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for PHP developers who want to use Smarty templates in their development, and for designers who are working with PHP developers who are using Smarty.

Author(s)

Hasin Hayder

Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET). He is an open-source enthusiast who has been programming since early 2001. He maintains phpXperts, the largest PHP user group in Bangladesh, and Zephyr, an open source AJAX-based MVC framework for PHP5 developers. He is currently working as a web application developer in a Norwegian software development company, "Somewhere In...". You can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Joao Prado Maia

Joćo Prado Maia is Lead Software Developer with Alert Logic, Inc. and was previously with MySQL AB as the lead developer behind Eventum, an issue tracking system, and MySQL Network, a subscription product for everything related to MySQL services. He has been working with PHP, Smarty, and PEAR for several years, and maintains phpbrasil.com, one of the most popular PHP-related community sites in Brazil. He is also interested in fostering a community of PHP developers in Houston by organizing the Houston PHP Users Group at http://houstonphp.org.

Lucian Gheorghe

Lucian Gheorghe has just joined the Global NOC of Interoute, Europe's largest voice and data network provider. Before Interoute, he was working as a senior network engineer for Globtel Internet, a significant Internet and Telephony Services Provider to the Romanian market He has been working with Linux for more than 8 years putting a strong accent on security for protecting vital data from hackers and ensuring good quality services for internet customers. Moving to VoIP services he had to focus even more on security as sensitive billing data is most often stored on servers with public IP addresses. He has been studying QoS implementations on Linux to build different types of services for IP customers and also to deliver good quality for them and for VoIP over the public internet. Lucian has also been programming with Perl, PHP and Smarty for over 5 years mostly developing in-house management interfaces for IP and VoIP services.