QUESTION INDEX -------------- GENERAL Q: What is Smarty? Q: What's the difference between Smarty and other template engines? Q: What do you mean "Compiled PHP Scripts" ? Q: Why can't I just use PHPA (http://php-accelerator.co.uk) or Zend Cache? Q: Why does smarty have a built in cache? Wouldn't it be better to handle this in a separate class? Q: Is Smarty faster than <insert other PHP template engine>? Q: How can I be sure to get the best performance from Smarty? Q: Do you have a mailing list? Q: Can you change the mailing list so reply-to sends to the list and not the user? TROUBLESHOOTING Q: Smarty doesn't work. Q: I get the following error when running Smarty: Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory "templates_c/239/239105369" in /path/to/Smarty.class.php on line 542 Q: I get the following error when running Smarty: Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_replace() in Smarty.class.php on line 371 Q: I get this error when passing variables to {include}: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_defined_vars() in /path/to/Smarty/templates_c/index.tpl.php on line 8 Q: I get PHP errors in my {if} tag logic. Q: I'm changing my php code and/or templates, and my results are not getting updated. Q: I'm running Windows 2000 and I get blank content. My compiled PHP files are also zero length. Q: The template goes into an infinite loop when I include included templates that pass local variables Q: Javascript is causing Smarty errors in my templates. Q: I get "SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. ..."-errors when running smarty. MISC Q: Can I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver to edit my templates? Q: Dreamweaver is urlencoding the template delimiters when they are in a SRC or HREF link. How do I get around this? HOWTO Q: How do I generate different cache files per template based on arguments passed to the page? Q: How do I pass a template variable as a parameter? {function param={$varname}} does not work. Q: How do I include cached template(s) within a non-cached template? GENERAL ------- Q: What is Smarty? A: Smarty is a template engine for PHP... but be aware this isn't just another PHP template engine. It's much more than that. Q: What's the difference between Smarty and other template engines? A: Most other template engines for PHP provide basic variable substitution and dynamic block functionality. Smarty takes a step further to be a "smart" template engine, adding features such as configuration files, template functions, variable modifiers (see the docs!) and making all of this functionality as easy as possible to use for both programmers and template designers. Smarty also compiles the templates into PHP scripts, eliminating the need to parse the templates on every invocation, making Smarty extremely scalable and manageable for large application needs. Q: What do you mean "Compiled PHP Scripts" ? A: Smarty reads the template files and creates PHP scripts from them. Once these PHP scripts are created, Smarty executes these, never having to parse the template files again. If you change a template file, Smarty will recreate the PHP script for it. All this is done automatically by Smarty. Template designers never need to mess with the generated PHP scripts or even know of their existance. (NOTE: you can turn off this compile checking step in Smarty for increased performance.) Q: Why can't I just use PHPA (http://php-accelerator.co.uk) or Zend Cache? A: You certainly can, and we highly recommend it! What PHPA does is caches compiled bytecode of your PHP scripts in shared memory or in a file. This speeds up server response and saves the compilation step. Smarty creates PHP scripts, which PHPA will cache nicely. Now, Smarty's built-in cache is something completely different. It caches the _output_ of the template contents. For example, if you have a template that requires several database queries, Smarty can cache this output, saving the need to call the database every time. Smarty and PHPA (or Zend Cache) complement each other nicely. If performance is of the utmost importance, we would recommend using one of these with any PHP application, using Smarty or not. As you can see in the benchmarks, Smartys performance _really_ excels in combination with a PHP accelerator. Q: Why does Smarty have a built in cache? Wouldn't it be better to handle this in a separate class? A: Smarty's caching functionality is tightly integrated with the template engine, making it quite a bit more flexible than a simple caching wrapper. For instance, you can cache select portions of a template page. Let's say you have a polling box on your site. With Smarty, you can leave the poll dynamic and cache the rest of the page. You can also pass templates multiple cache ids, meaning that a template can have several caches depending on URL, cookies, etc. Q: Is Smarty faster than <insert other PHP template engine>? A: See the benchmark page for some performance comparisons. Smarty's approach to templates is a bit different from some languages: it compiles templates into PHP scripts instead of parsing them on each invocation. This usually results in great performance gains, especially with complex templates. Coupled with the built-in caching of Smarty templates, the performance is outstanding. Q: How can I be sure to get the best performance from Smarty? A: Be sure you set $compile_check=false once your templates are initially compiled. This will skip the unneeded step of testing if the template has changed since it was last compiled. If you have complex pages that don't change too often, turn on the caching engine and adjust your application so it doesn't do unnecessary work (like db calls) if a cached page is available. See the documentation for examples. Q: Do you have a mailing list? A: We have a few mailing lists. "general" for you to share your ideas or ask questions, "dev" for those interested in the development efforts of Smarty, and "cvs" for those that would like to track the updates made in the cvs repository. send a blank e-mail message to: smarty-general-subscribe@lists.php.net (subscribe to the general list) smarty-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net (unsubscribe from the general list) smarty-general-digest-subscribe@lists.php.net (subscribe to digest) smarty-general-digest-unsubscribe@lists.php.net (unsubscribe from digest) smarty-dev-subscribe@lists.php.net (subscribe to the dev list) smarty-dev-unsubscribe@lists.php.net (unsubscribe from the dev list) smarty-cvs-subscribe@lists.php.net (subscribe to the cvs list) smarty-cvs-unsubscribe@lists.php.net (unsubscribe from the cvs list) You can also browse the mailing list archives at http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=smarty&r=1&w=2 Q: Can you change the mailing list so Reply-To sends to the list and not the user? A: Yes we could, but no we won't. Use "Reply-All" in your e-mail client to send to the list. http://www.unicom.com/pw/reply-to-harmful.html TROUBLESHOOTING --------------- Q: Smarty doesn't work. A: You must be using PHP 4.0.6 or later if you use any version of Smarty past 2.0.1. Read the BUGS file for more info. Q: I get the following error when running Smarty: Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory "templates_c/239/239105369" in /path/to/Smarty.class.php on line 542 A: Your web server user does not have permission to write to the templates_c directory, or is unable to create the templates_c directory. Be sure the templates_c directory exists in the location defined in Smarty.class.php, and the web server user can write to it. If you do not know the web server user, chmod 777 the templates_c directory, reload the page, then check the file ownership of the files created in templates_c. Or, you can check the httpd.conf (usually in /usr/local/apache/conf) file for this setting: User nobody Group nobody Q: I get the following error when running Smarty: Warning: Wrong parameter count for preg_replace() in Smarty.class.php on line 371 A: preg_replace had a parameter added in PHP 4.0.2 that Smarty requires. Upgrade to at least 4.0.6 to fix all known PHP issues with Smarty. Q: I get this error when passing variables to {include}: Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_defined_vars() in /path/to/Smarty/templates_c/index.tpl.php on line 8 A: get_defined_vars() was added to PHP 4.0.4. If you plan on passing variables to included templates, you will need PHP 4.0.6 or later. Q: I get PHP errors in my {if} tag logic. A: All conditional qualifiers must be separated by spaces. This syntax will not work: {if $name=="Wilma"} You must instead do this: {if $name == "Wilma"}. The reason for this is syntax ambiguity. Both "==" and "eq" are equivalent in the template parser, so something like {if $nameeq"Wilma"} wouldn't be parsable by the tokenizer. Q: I'm changing my php code and/or templates, and my results are not getting updated. A: This may be the result of your compile or cache settings. If you are changing your php code, your templates will not necessarily get recompiled to reflect the changes. Use $force_compile during develpment to avoid these situations. Also turn off caching during development when you aren't specifically testing it. You can also remove everything from your compile_dir and cache_dir and reload the page to be sure everything gets regenerated. Q: I'm running Windows 2000 and I get blank content. My compiled PHP files are also zero length. A: There seems to be a problem with some W2k machines and exclusive file locking. Comment out the flock() call in _write_file to get around this, although be aware this could possibly cause a problem with simultaneous writes to a file, especially with caching turned on. NOTE: As of Smarty 1.4.0, a workaround was put in place that should solve this. Q: The template goes into an infinite loop when I include included templates that pass local variables A: This was fixed in 1.3.2 (new global attribute) Q: Javascript is causing Smarty errors in my templates. A: Surround your javascript with {literal}{/literal} tags. See the docs. Q: I get "SAFE MODE Restriction in effect. ..."-errors when running smarty. A: Use $smarty->use_sub_dirs = false when running php in safe mode. MISC ---- Q: Can I use Macromedia's Dreamweaver to edit my templates? A: Certainly. You might want to change your tag delimiters from {} to something that resembles valid HTML, like <!--{ }--> or <{ }> or something similar. This way the editor won't view the template tags as errors. Q: Dreamweaver is urlencoding the template delimiters when they are in a SRC or HREF link. How do I get around this? A: In Edit - Properties - Rewrite HTML you can specify if Dreamweaver should change special letters to %-equivalent or not. The default is on which produces this error. HOWTO ----- Q: How do I generate different cache files per template based on arguments passed to the page? A: Use your $REQUEST_URI as the cache_id when fetching the page: global $REQUEST_URI; // if not already present $smarty->display('index.tpl',$REQUEST_URI); This will create a separate cache file for each unique URL when you call index.tpl. See the documentation for display() and fetch() Q: How do I pass a template variable as a parameter? {function param={$varname}} does not work. A: {function param=$varname} (You cannot nest template delimiters.) Q: How do I include cached template(s) within a non-cached template? A: One way to do it: $smarty->caching = true; $tpl1 = $smarty->fetch("internal1.tpl"); $tpl2 = $smarty->fetch("internal2.tpl"); $tpl3 = $smarty->fetch("internal3.tpl"); $smarty->assign("tpl1_contents",$tpl1); $smarty->assign("tpl2_contents",$tpl2); $smarty->assign("tpl3_contents",$tpl3); $smarty->caching = false; $smarty->display('index.tpl'); index.tpl --------- <table> <tr> <td>{$tpl1_contents}</td> <td>{$tpl2_contents}</td> <td>{$tpl3_contents}</td> </tr> </table> Another approach: You could write a custom insert function to fetch your internal templates: <table> <tr> <td>{insert name=fetch_tpl tpl="internal1.tpl"}</td> <td>{insert name=fetch_tpl tpl="internal2.tpl"}</td> <td>{insert name=fetch_tpl tpl="internal3.tpl"}</td> </tr> </table>