Smarty & Nested IF’s

Smarty is a great templating system for PHP – however if you’ve ever tried to do complex or reusable templates you can quickly find yourself with lots of nested IF’s.

They can be a pain to debug and trace through – especially with an abstracted template environment (such as Smarty) – as it’s impossible to step through the template generation line by line.

 A solution to writing cleaner code is to use something like:

switch ($var) {

  case "fred":

  break;

  case "wilma":

  break;

  default:

  break;

}

Unfortunately Smarty doesn’t have such syntax – but Smarty has a superb plugin environment that allows customisation of every aspect of templates.  The main maintainers of Smarty pointed me to an example, that with a little adjusting, allowed the switch/case statement to be implement.

The details of the plugin can be found on the Smarty Forums here.

Happy templating….

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