Installing the Smarty Template Engine
At first you need to download Smarty from http://smarty.php.net/download.php or you can download it directly from http://chapagain.googlecode.com/files/smarty.zip. Extract the zip file. Rename the extracted folder as ‘smarty’. Then, copy the folder ‘smarty’ to your working directory present inside the root directory of your web server.
There are different ways to install Smarty.
1) You can simply supply the absolute path to the Smarty library file:-
require(‘/usr/local/lib/php/Smarty/Smarty.class.php’);
2) You can add library directory to PHP include_path
Copy the libs folder from the Smarty distribution to the mycode folder (for example, C:\apache\htdocs\mycode\libs\).
After this, you need to edit the php.ini file and add include_path = “.;C:\apache\htdocs\ mycode\libs\” where C:\apache\htdocs\mycode\libs\ represents the location of your libs folder.
3) You can set SMARTY_DIR constant manually
define(‘SMARTY_DIR’, ‘/usr/local/lib/php/Smarty/’);
require(SMARTY_DIR . ‘Smarty.class.php’);
4) A slightly more flexible way to setup Smarty is to extend the class and initialize your Smarty environment. So instead of repeatedly setting directory paths, assigning the same vars, etc., we can do that in one place.
I will be explaining the fourth way, i.e. extending the class and initializing Smarty environment.
At first, let us have a look on the directory structure that we must create. Suppose, our work folder is named ‘example’, then our directory structure should be as under:-
example
|
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ smarty (this directory contains Smarty library files)
|
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ classes (this directory contains class files that we create)
|
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ smarty_temp (contains manually created Smarty directories)
|
|_ _ _ _ _ _ _ index.php
As stated at the beginning of this article, the Smarty library files are kept in the ‘smarty’ directory.
Smarty requires four directories which are (by default) named templates, templates_c, configs and cache. Each of these are definable by the Smarty class properties $template_dir, $compile_dir, $config_dir, and $cache_dir respectively. It is highly recommended that you setup a separate set of these directories for each application that will use Smarty. We create these directories inside ‘smarty_temp’ directory.
Now, let’s move to the class file which is kept inside the classes directory.
The above class is called in the index page. An object of the class is created. Then, the Smarty method called ‘assign’ is used to assign values to the template. Through assign method, you can explicitly pass name/value pairs, or associative arrays containing the name/value pairs. After that ‘display’ method is used to display the template.
index.tpl is the template file which contains html and smarty code.
Note: I have not included Smarty library files in this zip file. You can download the Smarty library files from http://smarty.php.net/download.php or directly from http://chapagain.googlecode.com/files/smarty.zip Thank You.<?php
/**
* Loading Smarty library
*/
require_once 'smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php';</span></span>
/**
* Connection to Smarty package
*
*/
class ConnectSmarty extends Smarty
{
/**
* This function connects with smarty
* manage paths to smarty directories
* @access public
*/
function ConnectSmarty()
{
$this->Smarty();
$this->template_dir = 'smarty_temp/templates';
$this->config_dir = 'smarty_temp/configs';
$this->cache_dir = 'smarty_temp/cache';
$this->compile_dir = 'smarty_temp/templates_c';
}
}
?>
</span><?php
require_once('classes/ConnectSmarty.class.php');
// create an object of the class included above
$smarty = new ConnectSmarty;
// assign content
$smarty->assign('name','Mukesh Chapagain');
$smarty->assign('address','Kathmandu, Nepal');
// display the content
$smarty->display('index.tpl');
?>
</span><html>
<head>
<title> Homepage </title>
</head>
<body>
The author of this tutorial:<br/><br/>
Name: {$name} <br/>
Address: {$address} <br/>
</body>
</html>
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