Blog about Design, Web development and Open Source

My last projects are all build with Zend Framework and almost all of my previous projects were created with custom framework using Smarty. I wanted to implement Smarty in Zend Framework and I search through the web to find proper resolution for my problem. I found this article and another one inspired by the first. I tested both approaches but they were not what I was looking for. Inspired by both articles I created my own Smarty - Zend framework implementation.

First creating custom Controller:

<?php
class Base_Controller extends Zend_Controller_Action
{
        
        /** 
         *  DISABLE DEFAULT ZEND FRAMEWORK VIEW  
         */
        public function init()
        {
        
        $this->_helper->viewRenderer->setNoRender(true);        
        
        }
        
        /**
         *  LOADING SMARTY ON DEMAND
         * 
         */
        public static function LoadSmarty()
        {
                
        include ('smarty/Smarty.class.php');    

        $smarty = new Smarty();
        
        $smarty->template_dir =  template dir ;
        $smarty->compile_dir  = compile dir;
        $smarty->config_dir   = config dir 
        $smarty->cache_dir    = cache dir;
        $smarty->plugins_dir = and plugins ;
        
        
        
        /**
         *  SMARTY CONFIGURATION
         * 
         */
        $smarty->debugging = false;
        $smarty->force_compile = true;
        $smarty->compile_check = true;

        
        /**
         *      SMARTY PLUGINS 
         * 
         */ 
        //include various smarty plugins 
        
        Zend_Registry::set('smarty', $smarty);
        
                        
        }
        
}


?>

This is example of the custom Base Controller, if we want to include Smarty in particular Controller we extend Base Controller

<?php
include ('kernel/Base_Controller.php');

class IndexController extends Base_Controller 
{
     public function indexAction() 
    { 
                
        $this->IncludeSmarty();
        $smarty = Zend_Registry::get('smarty');
        $smarty->assign('title', 'Test Page index');
        
        
        /** DEFINE PAGE TEMPLATES */
        $smarty->display('includes/header.tpl');
        $smarty->display('demo.tpl');
        $smarty->display('includes/footer.tpl');
        
         
        }

/**
         *  FUNCTION FOR LOADING SMARTY
         * 
         * @return smarty object
         */
        
        public static function IncludeSmarty()
        {               
        Base_Controller::LoadSmarty();
        }
}

If we are building some pages, that doesn’t require Smarty or we want it to use Zend_View component the only difference is that the custom controller extends the default Zend_Controller

<?php
include ('kernel/Base_Controller.php');

class IndexController extends Zend_Controller_Action
// ALL LOGIC HERE

With this approach Smarty will be used only when it is needed and.If we completely skip Zend_View in our custom framework we can avoid the frustrating for me default Zend Framework View directory. structure.