6 Killer Smarty Features You Need to Know

Smarty is by far my favorite PHP template engine. I’ll debate the pros and cons of using a template engine in another post, but I wanted to share some of the Smarty features that I didn’t know existed until I dug through the manual.

1. {cycle}

{cycle} is definitely my favorite Smarty command. You pass it a string of comma-separated values and it cycles through them. I mostly use this, as the manual demonstrates, for zebra striping tables or comments or any sort of list.

{section name=rows loop=$data}
<tr bgcolor="{cycle values="#eeeeee,#d0d0d0"}">
   <td>{$data[rows]}</td>
</tr>
{/section}

2. {foreachelse}

In php, I normally do things like if count(array) > 0 then foreach the array. This essentially uses two statements and messes up my code. Smarty takes care of this for me with {foreachelse}:

{foreach key=cid item=con from=$results}
    <a href="contact.php?contact_id={$cid}">{$con.name} - {$con.nick}</a><br />
{foreachelse}
    No items were found in the search
{/foreach}

3. {insert}

Smarty’s caching mechanism is one of it’s best features. Caching your pages can really cut down on your page’s computation time and speed things up. Normally, even if only a small portion of your page is dynamic, you can’t cache the whole page. Smarty takes care of that however with the {insert} function. They work like normal {include} functions (which work just like PHP’s include() function) except they do not cache the included file, even when the rest of the template is cached.

4. {counter}

Before I realized there was a {counter} function, I would use the {assign} function to do x = x + 1. {counter} handles all of that for you with a number of other great options including direction (count up/down), skip, start, print and assign. Extremely useful for any time where you need to create a numbered list out of a database or API call.

{counter start=0 skip=2}<br />
{counter}<br />
{counter}<br />
{counter}<br />

will output:

0<br />
2<br />
4<br />
6<br />

5. {html_table}

You have to use tables sometimes. {html_table} is an easy method to output the HTML for the table without using a {foreach} and inserting all the HTML yourself. For example, this PHP:

$smarty->assign( 'data', array(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) );
$smarty->assign( 'tr', array('bgcolor="#eeeeee"','bgcolor="#dddddd"') );

and this Smarty:

{html_table loop=$data cols="first,second,third,fourth" tr_attr=$tr table_attr='border="0"'}

will generate this HTML:

<table border="0">
<thead>
<tr>
<th>first</th><th>second</th><th>third</th><th>fourth</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr bgcolor="#eeeeee"><td>1</td><td>2</td><td>3</td><td>4</td></tr>
<tr bgcolor="#dddddd"><td>5</td><td>6</td><td>7</td><td>8</td></tr>
<tr bgcolor="#eeeeee"><td>9</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
</tbody>
</table>

6. The Debugging Console

When building a large app or working with an app I didn’t build (more likely), figuring out what variables are available and what there values are can be a real pain. Rather than sticking a bunch of echo or var_dump commands in the PHP, I simply called up the Smarty debugging console. The debugging console uses Javascript to popup a window that shows you the names of all the included templates and the assigned variables for the current page.

There are three options for calling up the console.

Set the $debugging config variable to TRUE. The console is always shown when this variable is turned on. Useful when you’re in the middle of development.
Set the $debugging_ctrl config variable to TRUE. In this case, simply add SMARTY_DEBUG in the query string of the page you want to debug. This is useful when you want to debug a live site.
Use {$debug} inside a template when you want to debug just one template. Useful when extending a live site or editing just one template.

Did this post help you? Did you know it all already? What else do you like/dislike about Smarty?