What is a template engine?

A very fair question to begin with. We use a template engine to render (paste) the data from the submission forms into our article templates. The template engine allows us to use a simple syntax (tags) in to assign the places where the information will be pasted.

In Form2Content we call these 'tags' Template Parameters. Each F2C template parameters is a reference to a bit of data from the submission form.

An example

If there is a text area (field type) in the F2C submission form called "introduction", users can add plain text into the text area.

Now if we want to show the text in our article we need to add the following Template parameter to our introduction template.

{$INTRODUCTION}

The Smarty template engine also allows us to do many other things like only use the first 200 characters of the text. In this case the template parameter would look like this:

{$INTRODUCTION|truncate:200}

Since Smarty is 'smart' it will leave tha last word in one piece.

Smarty documentation

One of the reasons we have chosen Smarty is because of the active support website and documentation. Please follow the following links to the Smarty website for extensive documentation.

Documentation: http://www.smarty.net/docs.php (different languages)
Forum: http://www.smarty.net/forums/