The first two chapters are an introduction to Smarty. The remaining chapters of the book are divided into two main sections. Chapters 3-7 deal with Smarty template design, and are aimed primarily at designers. The later chapters get more technical, showing how programmers can work with Smarty and PHP to create complex, interactive and high performance applications. Here’s what each chapter covers:

Chapter 1 will ease you into the world of Smarty. Starting with an overview of what templating systems are and why you use them, it goes on to consider Smarty specifically. Once that’s covered, you’ll see how to install Smarty so you’re ready to begin your Smarty development.

Chapter 2 discusses how Smarty can make projects easier for programmers and designers, reduce the time taken on programming and maintenance, and bring harmony to the fraught relationship between designers and programmers. You’ll then see how to start your first n-tier Smarty project.

Chapter 3 is a designer’s overview of Smarty, explaining the key concepts and how designers can create versatile and attractive templates and layouts.

Chapter 4 looks at templates in detail, showing how values pass into templates and how to use them in applications such as calendars, database-backed reports, email newsletters and more.

Chapter 5 covers more advanced ways to work with templates, including how to play with variables right in the template using modifiers.

Chapter 6 delves into the programming side of Smarty. There are many powerful functions that designers can use to make Smarty development easier and more productive. This chapter introduces the most useful of these, and provides practical examples of functions in action.

With all the added power in the designer’s hands, there are bound to be mistakes occasionally.

Chapter 7 will introduce you to methods for debugging your Smarty templates, so that you’ll be able to find why the wrong values are being displayed, or that pesky extra <td> tag is ruining your layout.

Chapter 8 starts with more technical aspects of Smarty. You will see how built-in variables and methods bring added functionality to your PHP code, with very little extra work.

Chapter 9 looks at how Smarty can make the code itself faster. This in-depth look at Smarty’s caching and performance features, and how to optimize your code for them, will enable you to write very scalable and fast applications with Smarty.

Chapter 10 pushes Smarty even further, showing how to extend its capabilities with downloadable plug-ins, and even showing how to write your own.

Chapter 11 takes a detailed look at filters, which are a special kind of plug-in.

Chapter 12 concludes the book with a look at how to make your website available in different locales and languages using Smarty’s internationalization features.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: “We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive.”

A block of code will be set as follows:

<?php
include_once(‘libs/Smarty.class.php’);
$smarty = new Smarty;
$smarty->caching = 1;
$smarty->display(‘example2.tpl’);
?>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:

<?php
include_once(‘libs/Smarty.class.php’);
$smarty = new Smarty;
$smarty->caching = 1;
$smarty->display(‘example2.tpl’);
?>

Any command-line input and output is written as follows:

$ xgettext -o smartybook.po -n *.php

New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: “clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen”.

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