bensoer / codeenlightener

The CodeIgniter Framework "Enlightened" with the addition of the Smarty Template Engine

#CodeEnlightener The CodeIgniter Framework "Enlightened" with the addition of the Smarty Template Engine

CodeIgniter is a decent lightweight engine. But it lacks one flaw that makes web design with the framework painful and unflexible. Its current templating engine forces the user to clog thier controllers with extra logic for the view. With the addition of the Smarty Template Engine this is now mostly avoided. Controller logic now contains more legible code that shows better what is happening to the data before it is being sent to the view. It also allows for a more flexible view with less ambiguous template terms used in the Smarty engine. The Smarty integration unleashes the full power of Smarty with the ability to not only simply pass strings, but objects that can be iterated through thier attribute content, as well as additional filtering objects for scenarios where data may or may not be available (eg. error messages in the view)

Currently CodeEnlightener uses CodeIgniter v3.0-dev and Smarty v3.1.21
**CodeEnlightener has not updated to CodeIgniter v3.0rc3 due to a compatability bug with Smarty

#Setup Setup of the project is the same as any other CodeIgniter project except for 1 extra step is needed for the Smarty library. When publishing the project to your host, you need to ensure that the templates_c folder inside the application/views directory has read and write access. This is because Smarty caches previous pages to speed up request times for pages that have not changed

####Configuration Locations If you would like to apply some of your own custom configurations to the Smarty library. The smarty components are located in the following directories:

• Smarty.php - main configuration file - application/libraries/Smarty.php
• Smarty core - application/third_party/smarty
• Smarty Default Template Directory - application/views/templates
• Smarty Default Template Cache Directory - application/views/templates_c

The project is preset up with the Smarty library autoloaded. in the application/config/autoload.php file

If you would like to swap out the current CodeIgniter engine with a different one, you can do so without effecting any directory dependencies with Smarty as all dependencies are managed within the application folder. Changes to the system folder other then possible core compatability issues will have no effect on Smarty

A tutorial to setup your own CodeIgniter with Smarty can be found here:
http://www.coolphptools.com/codeigniter-smarty

#Usage The project is still the CodeIgniter framework in the back, except with the Smarty engine for the front! Everything except how data is passed from the controller to the view with smarty is the same! You can checkout the standard codeigniter documents at CodeIgniter.com and the Smarty Template Engine docs at Smarty.net. You can take a quick Smarty Crash Course at: "http://www.smarty.net/crash_course"

####Introduction Below is a general use introduction of how to interact with smarty in codeigniter. Please refer after to smarty docs for more extensive details on all of the features in smarty

Within your controller you can access the smarty template engine within the $this reference. You can assign values to be passed to your view as so:

$this->smarty->assign("<name_of_key>","<value>");

//example
$this->smarty->assign("title", "Welcome To CodeEnlightener");

Once you have finished assigning all values to be passed to the view. Call the template file to load. These template files will replace your views in CodeIgniter as smarty will handle them and render them into appropriate html files to be returned to the browser

$this->smarty->display("<name_of_template>.tpl");

//example
$this->smarty->display("welcome.tpl");

Additionaly, if you still have a preference for CodeIgniter's implementation of its parse method. There is an equivelent function call available with the Smarty class.

Like the parse method, the first parameter takes the name of the template to apply the attributes to, the second parameter is the data array which is an associative array of key and value pairs of the substitutions. If you preferre to assign your key/value data the CodeIgniter way through the $this->data array you can do that aswell, and then simply pass $this->data as the second parameter. Finally, pass TRUE or FALSE in the last parameter to return the view back instead of to the browser.

$this->smarty->view($template, $data=array(), TRUE/FALSE);

//example
$this->smarty->view("welcome.tpl", $this->data, FALSE);