Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional Fourth Edition

Chapter 19. Templating with Smarty

All web development careers start at the very same place: with the posting of a simple web page. And boy was it easy. You just added some text to a file, saved it with an .html extension, and uploaded it to a web server. Soon enough, you were incorporating animated GIFs, JavaScript, and eventually PHP code into your pages. Your site began to swell, first to 5 pages, then 15, then 50. It seemed to grow exponentially. Then came that fateful decision, the one you always knew was coming but somehow managed to cast aside: it was time to redesign the site.

Unfortunately, you forgot one of programming's basic tenets: always strive to separate presentation and logic. Failing to do so not only increases the possibility ...