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Quick Smarty Install

In Debian Etch:

  1. apt-get install smarty
  2. edit php.ini (mine's at /etc/php5/apache2 and set include_path to ".:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear:/usr/share/php/smarty/libs"
  3. restart apache2 with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you have a Smarty install. To use it, you'll need PHP code to drive Smarty. I'll include a sample bit of PHP code that I was working on with Mike A:

<?php
        require("Smarty.class.php");
        $smarty = new Smarty();

        $dir = '/var/www-sites.d/malborn.pachogrande.com';

        $smarty->template_dir = $dir . '/smarty/templates';
        $smarty->compile_dir = $dir . '/smarty/templates_c';
        $smarty->cache_dir = $dir . '/smarty/cache';
        $smarty->config_dir =$dir . '/smarty/configs';

        $content = implode('', file($dir . "/index.txt"));
        $head = implode('', file($dir . "/head.txt"));
        $footer = implode('', file($dir . "/footer.txt"));
        $navbar = implode('', file($dir . "/navbar.txt"));

        if(preg_match('/<title>(.*?)<\/title>/is', $head, $m)) {
                $title = $m[1];
        } else {
                $title = "Default Title";
        }

        $smarty->assign("title", $title);
        $smarty->assign("head", $head);
        $smarty->assign("footer", $footer);
        $smarty->assign("content", $content);
        $smarty->assign("navbar", $navbar);
        $smarty->display("default.tpl");
?>

Now, for Smarty to operate you need to supply some directories (i.e. template_dir, compile_dir, cache_dir, config_dir). compile_dir and cache_dir need to writeable by the web server user so in Debian something like:

#!/bin/bash

DIR=/var/www-sites.d/malborn.pachogrande.com

mkdir $DIR/smarty
mkdir $DIR/smarty/cache
mkdir $DIR/smarty/configs
mkdir $DIR/smarty/templates
mkdir $DIR/smarty/templates_c

sudo chown -r :www-data $DIR/smarty/cache
sudo chown -r :www-data $DIR/smarty/templates_c

Write default.tpl into $DIR/smarty/templates/default.tpl . For example,

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>

<head>
{$head}
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css" media="screen"/>
<title>{$title}</title>
</head>

<body>

<div class="body">

        <div class="title">{$title}</div>

        <div class="subnav">

                <h1>Navigation</h1>
                {$navbar}

        </div>

        <div class="main">

                        {$content}

        </div>

        <div class="footer">

                        {$footer}

        </div>

</div>

</body>
</html>

Now, moving from here would be something like:

   1. Writing code to check for a navbar.txt in the current direction. If not found, stuff navbar Smarty tag with "Back up a level" that moves up one subdirectory (i.e. go to /directory/index.html if you were are /directory/author.html, and go to /index.html when you were are /directory/index.html, etc.)
   2. Could proceed by designing a number of templates in Smarty for the same basic content - i.e. skin-bluesteel.tpl and then providing a user interface to switch templates.
   3. Perhaps eliminate filesystem reliance and put URL's into a database. Map /directory to /directory/index.html, similar with /. If not in database, display a generic 404 error. You can develop this script by calling it like /database-script-were-writing.php/directory/index.html and then looking into PATH_INFO from the server which will contain /directory/index.html . Once you have this perfected, you set up apache with something like "Alias / /var/www-sites.d/malborn.pachogrande.com/database-script-were-writing.php" and everything should pretty much just work.