The idea behind a templating system is to separate logic from layout. The Smarty Template system does a
good job of doing this. Here we will convert our basic guestbook example to use Smarty.
% ls -R
.:
config/ smartyguest.php templates/ templates_c/
./templates:
smartyguest.tpl
./templates_c:
smartyguest.tpl.php
We separate the HTML from the PHP code into
templates/smartyguest.tpl and
./smartyguest.php respectively.
templates/smartyguest.tpl
<html><head><title>My Guestbook</title></head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to my Guestbook</h1>
<h2>Please write me a little note below</h2>
<form action="{$SCRIPT_NAME}" method="POST">
<textarea cols=40 rows=5 name="note" wrap=virtual></textarea>
<input type="submit" value=" Send it ">
</form>
<h2>The entries so far:</h2>
{section name=msgs loop=$notes}
{$notes[msgs].id} {$notes[msgs].ts} {$notes[msgs].comment}<br>
{/section}
</body></html>
smartyguest.php
<?php
require('Smarty.class.php');
$smarty = new Smarty;
$smarty->debugging = true;
mysql_connect('localhost','nobody');
mysql_select_db('mydb');
/* insert new note */
if(isset($note)) {
$ts = date("Y-m-d H:i:s");
mysql_query("insert into comments values
(0,'$note','$ts')");
}
/* read existing notes */
$result = mysql_query('select * from comments');
if(!$result) echo mysql_error();
while($notes[]=mysql_fetch_array($result,MYSQL_ASSOC));
$smarty->assign('notes',$notes);
$smarty->display("smartyguest.tpl");
?>
