Is it necessary to learn Smarty?

[ayaya]

Hello all,

I start learning php for several weeks. I got to know Smarty recently. It looks very complicated. Do you think it's necessary to learn it?

[Jessica]

It's not that complicated, it's super dumbed down PHP. If you want to work somewhere that uses it you'll have to learn it. It's not that useful when you first start PHP.

[exeTrix]

I think that Smarty bridges the gap between developers and designers. It also facilitates the separation of business logic and template code because you'll usually have a PHP file and one or more views/templates. The latter of which can be achieved easily though using a modern framework, so in the second instance it'd probably be overkill to use it if that was the only benefit.

 

Essentially, it's a template parser that allows the site builder (this can be a designer with only HTML knowledge) to add loops etc to pages without having to know PHP syntax.

 

Just bear in mind, if you're planning on using Smarty there will be a substancial overhead involved as files are being parsed twice before output is generated.