I have been doing some PHP, mostly tada list clone, but also the app for work. I have been using Smarty as the templating “engine” for them. It’s actually quite nice. It allows me to do PHP much like I would Perl using html::template.
From more than one person I have heard “It just kills me that there is a template language for…well a template language”. And I understand the sentiment, however PHP, like it or not, has out grown it’s templating roots (if it’s good at what it does is another debate). However we can now code fairly complex web apps in PHP and in doing so, we should probably seek to keep the code and the content as seperate as possible to aid in debugging. I don’t think I would be interested in writing PHP if not for Smarty, it really does keep things cleaner.
Ah yes, Smarty. I need to get back into coding, but that does look to be the way to go when it comes to PHP and page stuff.