What best practices should PHP developers follow when transitioning from custom template systems to established template engines like Smarty?

When transitioning from custom template systems to established template engines like Smarty, PHP developers should follow best practices such as separating business logic from presentation, using template inheritance for reusability, and leveraging built-in features like caching and escaping to improve performance and security. 

// Example code snippet demonstrating the best practices for transitioning to Smarty

// Separating business logic from presentation
// Custom template system
$data = getDataFromDatabase();
include('custom_template.php');

// Smarty template engine
$data = getDataFromDatabase();
$smarty->assign('data', $data);
$smarty->display('template.tpl');

// Using template inheritance for reusability
// Custom template system
include('header.php');
include('content.php');
include('footer.php');

// Smarty template engine
$smarty->display('header.tpl');
$smarty->display('content.tpl');
$smarty->display('footer.tpl');

// Leveraging caching and escaping
// Custom template system
echo '<h1>' . htmlspecialchars($title) . '</h1>';
echo '<p>' . nl2br(htmlspecialchars($content)) . '</p>';

// Smarty template engine
$smarty->assign('title', $title);
$smarty->assign('content', $content);
$smarty->display('template.tpl');

Keywords

PHP template engines Smarty migration custom templates

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