Smarty is a templating engine for PHP. Designers who are used to working with HTML files can work with Smarty templates, which are HTML files with simple tags while programmers work with the underlying PHP code. The Smarty engine brings the code and templates together. The result of all this is that designers can concentrate on designing, programmers can concentrate on programming, and they don't need to get in each others way so much. Even if you are developing a site on your own, Smarty is a powerful way to make your code clearer to you and others, as well as easier to debug and modify later.

This book is a comprehensive guide to all aspects of using Smarty. It will help you to:
-Install and configure Smarty on your Web server
- Understand how Smarty affects your web site architecture, and build site foundations that make the most of what Smarty offers
- Designers will learn to work with templates that contain variables and logic, to modify layouts or content of Smarty web sites
- See how Smarty caching can improve the performance of your sites
- Develop custom Smarty functions and plug-ins to incorporate into your templates

Using a step-by-step approach based on realistic examples, the expert authors show you how to use Smarty in your own PHP development. The book is ideal for PHP developers who are new to Smarty, and for web designers who are working with PHP developers who are using Smarty.

About the Author
Hasin Hayder graduated in Civil Engineering from Rajshahi University of Engineering and Technology (RUET). He is an open-source enthusiast who has been programming since early 2001. He maintains phpXperts, the largest PHP user group in Bangladesh, and Zephyr, an open source AJAX-based MVC framework for PHP5 developers. He is currently working as a web application developer in a Norwegian software development company, "Somewhere In...". You can reach him at hasin@somewherein.net.

João Prado Maia is Lead Software Developer with Alert Logic, Inc. and was previously with MySQL AB as the lead developer behind Eventum, an issue tracking system, and MySQL Network, a subscription product for everything related to MySQL services. He has been working with PHP, Smarty, and PEAR for several years, and maintains phpbrasil.com, one of the most popular PHP-related community sites in Brazil. Lucian Gheorghe is currently working as a senior network engineer for Globtel Internet, a significant Internet and Telephony Services Provider to the Romanian market. Even if it's not his main activity, He has been programming in PHP for over 5 years building billing interfaces, industrial software interfaces, e-commerce sites, and so on. He had a lot of help from a friend called Smarty in his programming experiences. Lucian got his first taste of writing when he contributed a few chapters to the book Beginning PHP 5 and MySQL E-Commerce by Cristian Darie and Mihai Bucica, Apress, 2004, with his appendix for Project Management added to the book Beginning ASP.NET 2.0 E-Commerce in C# 2005 by Cristian Darie and Karli Watson, Apress, 2005.