Templates and Programming Style

[dwatson]

I am a newbie to osCommerce, but have 6 months of intensive PHP work. I am sure this topic has been discussed, so forgive my not finding the earlier threads. As a newcommer, the first thing I did was to read through the index.php. The first obvious thing is the style: It weaves in and out of PHP and HTML, intermixing the two. Templating systems aim to reduce this mishmash and segregate out the html so that it is easier for designers to style and coders to code. I noticed in release notes that this was a future goal for osCommerce (MS3?). My question: what is the view of people on this, the perceived importance of this, and the expectations in terms of releases? Also, are any particular templating systems being discussed or used for development, like Smarty? osCommerce is obviously a solid and very useful system, and I am not trying to be a purist -- just somone who would rather hand off design work to designers.

Thanks, David Watson

[dwatson]

I did the search on "template" as I should have before posting (sorry). I got my answer to the state of that discussion. I will start adding my two-bits to that thread -- basically that I would vote for any genuine templating engine, and it would be even better if it included the ability to cache or other performance enhancements. I want to base all eCommerce work around osCommerce in the long run; but I think it must go in this direction. Thanks.