[UPHPU] Template engines

[Velda Christensen]

Oops.  This was supposed to go to the list :-p  I'll climb back in my 
cave now..
-Velda

-------- Original Message --------

>> Again, I'm not a designer, so take it with a grain of salt, or a 
>> block of salt
>> if you want, but I can't remember a single time in the last 5 years 
>> where we've
>> had a designer that wanted to do the HTML while we did the PHP/MySQL 
>> stuff,
>> even though Wade was one of the designers we worked with.
>>
>> Mac 

I'd imagine templates aren't AS useful when you're working with the 
designer so much as they are when the designer is someone you've never 
dealt with.  As a devil's advocate and designer myself, I use Smarty 
templates (or some sort of template system) all the time.  Not as often 
when I'm working directly with a programmer.  But I have to skin carts 
and blogs and all sorts of pre-written packages.  If I'm working with a 
package, open source or purchased, I typically wont' work with it unless 
it utilizes a template system of one sort or another, because I don't 
want to have to manually apply patches (as one often must do if the 
design is mixed in with the programming logic)

On a smaller scale, if you're working a an employee with a designer you 
didn't choose (and certainly the designer didn't choose you either) it 
helps to keep things separate there too.  I about lost my mind with a 
programmer who'd blame every bug on my ability to access and edit the 
php.  All I'd done is add CSS classes to div tags, but he'd say I must 
have accidentally edited some code I wasn't supposed to touch; if a 
mistake was made, obviously it was mine because I wasn't really a 
programmer.  He felt that designers shouldn't try to be programmers, but 
we had to work together to meet deadlines.  A template system there 
would have saved sanity :-)

>From your favorite graphic artist and devil's advocate,

Velda