Tutorials

Using the Smarty template engine

Smarty is a fully featured template engine developed separately from Vigilante. To learn more about how to use Smarty, visit http://smarty.php.net/.

To create a Smarty object, call the Smarty() function at the top of your page. The object is assigned to the reserved variable $smarty.

Vigilante does not use Smarty's default file paths to store its libraries, so it is recommended to initialize a Smarty object with the Smarty() function. If you want to assign a Smarty object to another variable, create a new object named Smarty_Extended. You can also simply assign a variable of your own choosing to the $smarty variable.

Example 2-7-1
// Reassign the reserved variable $smarty to one of your choosing.

Smarty();
$page = $smarty;

// Assign your variable to Vigilante's extended Smarty class.

$page = new Smarty_Extended;

// Calling the default Smarty class will cause errors in Vigilante.

$page = new Smarty;


Vigilante includes the following set of default template files:

• global_header.tpl
  Use this template to store the top portion of your HTML source code.
• global_footer.tpl
  Use this template to store the bottom portion of your HTML source code.
• global_page.tpl
  This template concatenates global_header.tpl, global_footer.tpl and a content template passed to Smarty from your PHP scripts.
• root_index.tpl
  Use this template to store the default page of your site.

To simplify template maintenance, create separate templates to store your content, independent of any header or footer layout. When your script is ready to pass its data to Smarty, assign the name of a template to the variable $content_template and display global_page.tpl.

Example 2-7-2
include("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/includes/common.php");
//Initialize the Smarty object
Smarty();

[. . . multple Smarty assignments . . .]

$smarty->assign("content_template", "template_file.tpl");
$smarty->display("global_page.tpl");