Smarty templating EZ enough for the masses? If not, what is?

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DaveTheAve
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Smarty templating EZ enough for the masses? If not, what is?

Post by DaveTheAve »

I'm about to develop a tool targeted mostly to people with little-to-no programming experience and I need to find a STRONG templating system that they can use. Think of my tool as a RSS-2-HTML parser (Don't worry; it's not).

The user will need to design the template for the rss's html output. I can think of a really simple version I can code myself, that will provide variable support like such:
[*title*], [*feed*], [*footer*],[*page_url*], [*link_menu*].

However, I feel that a system this simple will limit the design ability and possibly some users. Would implementing the Smarty Templating engine or another templating engine be a better choice as far as flexibility and ease of use? See with the ability to use Smarty's section tags one could iterate though the feed variable to provide better styling and iterate though the link_menu variable to allow links to be set inside ul lists instead of just plain-old text-links.

Edit: Another thing for me to consider is the speed that the system adds to the script. Speaking of which does anyone know how bad the Zend Framework is in terms of speed benchmarking? I've been using Zend Framework for a while but not in such a performance-tight situation.
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Re: Smarty templating EZ enough for the masses? If not, what is?

Post by pickle »

<cynic>
There is no such thing as a programming language (& therefore a template engine/language) that you can be sure people with no programming experience will be able to easily pick up on their own. Some people just can't figure out how programs/programming works.
</cynic>

I think a BBCode parser is probably your best bet. Sure it'll limit some users, but with more flexibility comes more complexity. For the average non-programmer, BBCode is much easier to understand than a full template language.
Real programmers don't comment their code. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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