Smarty is becoming more and more popular in the PHP community lately, especially as developers are moving away from mixing business and display logic in the same scripts and towards a cleaner MVC design pattern implementations.
If you’ve followed my blog for any amount of time, you’ll know that I’m currently working on my own CMS/Framework, to be completed hopefully in early 2007. I don’t know what it was – maybe procrastination – but something make me take a look back at my plugin implementation for the CMS.
Previously I took a rather odd, round-about way of including custom functions and plugin templates into my main pages:
Step 1: include the plugin template
Step 2: The plugin template called the template FUNCTION
Step 3: The function does a lot of business and assigns data to template variables
Step 4: the rest of the template is rendered with the newly-found data from the function
That’s a little too awkward, even for me!
It had to be simpler. Turns out the answer was always there…
The template functions (function.funcname.php : smarty_function_funcname() ) have the smarty object passed to them by reference, which means I can access anything Smarty from within that function. Jackpot! Here’s my newly preferred way of inserting these plugin data into your pages:
Step 1: call the plugin function directly from your main page template
Step 2: do all the businessy things, including assigning variables
Step 3: call $smarty->display(“plugin_template.tpl”) from within your plugin function
Why is this better? First, it’s more straightforward this way. It’s easier to pre-assign your templates directory in the header of your scripts and just call $smarty->display(). Second you can actually pass parameters to your function if you want (read: customizable/configurable plugin functionality). Want to have a choice of plugin templates depending on the output of your function, time of day, or little Jimmy’s iTunes playlist RSS syndication? No problem!
Elegant. Customizable. Smart!
Have you considered building an API for plusins? 😀
Did you have something particular in-mind? From the viewpoint of the CMS I’m developing, the plugins have wide-ranging access to the application’s resources – like a framework/API.
From another standpoint I can see a potential creating a series of smarty plugins for services like the Google Maps API:
{google_map address=$address zoom=$zoom bubble=$text …}