Template engine help (Newbie question)

[droomagon]

Hello everyone,

This thread actually comes in two parts, and since i'm not an advanced programmer such as you folks, so i'll start off slow...

I've searched through the forum, and the internet, but I wasn't able to find something that I needed... a template system that is easy to script.

What I need is actually pretty simple, a friend of mine that already has his product information stored inside the database (product title, description, pdf file, and so on), my goal is to display the products using a template (html file) and driven by the php (index page) to loop over however many products he has.

If i'm not mistaken though, this should be only 2 files for this, 1 would be the index file that includes the DB connect and whatnot, and the 2nd file would be the html file itself.

The other question is that, I havn't got a clue if his host has Smarty installed, although I could email and ask them, but that would take about a week for them to respond... is there a faster way to detect if Smarty is installed?

If you guys would recommend a simple template tutorial, that'll be great.

Thanks in advance !

[wisewood]

you could do it all with the one file if you really wanted to... just incorporate the html into the php file.

[droomagon]

I did do that actually, incorporating the html codes within the php, but the thing is that, it has grown into such a huge file with few thousand lines, it gets kinda hard to maintain, so i'm looking for ways to simplify it.

As well as, my friend told me, that he wish to change the layout in the future, so i figure its the best way to convert the website to template base now, not later...

My main objective is to:
- construct dynamic website (which is at the moment)
- strip the html code from current php file (big file atm, about 50k filesize), and incorporate html template
- simplify codes, use html driven template for friend's dynamic web content

Any suggestion is appreciated.