Greetings!
Man has the time passed rather quickly or am I just crazy? Things have been so busy, crazy and overwhelming, it seems that I have made little progress with my projects.
So… I have been working with Smarty on my phpZIPdir project as mentioned in my prior post Beginning Development with Smarty. I must say that I really do love that template engine! I have rewritten my code on The Gutter Directory, truthfully I only have about 80% of the code fixed/completed, but by following the “Why Use Smarty” page I am quite sure that I have removed all application logic from the templates which will ultimately make phpZIPdir a fully functional, turn-key application.
I still have a lot more work to do to get phpZIPdir into a release state, but I have read the Smarty Documentation about 2 times through, so I am beginning to really grasp everything that happens behind the scenes, which helps me understand the line between Designers and Coders.
I hope to have some time to code within the next couple of weeks to get phpZIPdir into a release state so strenuous public testing can occur. I will update again when I have made such progress.
I have helped with a few projects in the past couple years which have used the Smarty template engine as a backbone for their template/presentation framework. It is really useful in projects and scripts because it keeps the PHP code separate from the design of the website. You can read a detailed overview of Smarty at the official website.
Like I stated before, I have helped troubleshoot/design for projects using the technology, but I never really sat down to learn more about Smarty, but today I found some time to continue development on my phpZIPdir project (which I have not touched since the initial code write), so I decided it is time to get Smarty integrated so the product can finally get to its public beta testing stage. I fiddled around with the setup for a couple hours and read the documentation to get myself started. Through quite a bit of trial and error, I have successfully integrated Smarty into about 65% of the phpZIPdir project thus far. Once you get the hang of the syntax it is really easy to move forward.
Once I finish phpZIPdir I will open it up for a public beta, and hopefully I will find a few good testers. I will post more about it when the time comes. I urge anyone interested to in phpZIPdir to take a look at The Gutter Directory to see the latest version in action (with Smarty 65% integrated -although you will not really be able to tell from the front end!). I would like some feedback on it if possible!