Smarty 3 coming soon, whats required?

Looks like Smarty 3.0 is going live soon, beta testing is almost done. How easy will it be to integrate in to CS-Cart or should I just move on? There are some interesting changes in 3.0 that would be great to have.

I was thinking of posting on the very same subject yesterday.



CS-Cart is running version 2.6.18 of the Smarty engine which was released in 3/2007. There have been a number of bugfixes (some related to security) which CS-Cart has passed on - they have perhaps provided their own solution in the code.



But Smarty 3 promises substantial new features with SPEED being near the top of the list. I am hoping that CS-Cart will be reviewing version 3 as a replacement for the existing template engine. On the other hand, I don’t believe we should see a quick switch to a “stable” 3.x branch for an e-commerce site - probably better to wait things out for a while.



Below is a list of new features in Smarty 3:

PHP5 OO design
SPEED
Object Chaining
Exception Error Handling
Assigned Data Objects
Multiple Template Objects
Static Object Access
Pure PHP Template Option
Powerful Parser/Lexer
Tons of Template Syntax Enhancements
Improved Data Scoping Features
Variable Filters (ie. auto-html-escape)
In-template Functions (easy recursion)
Template Inheritance
PHP Streams Support (per template/variable/include)
Smart javascript/css handling (no more {literal} tags)
Improved Cache handling (per template/variable/function)
Many other things too numerous!




Bob

Yeah the speed and the smart js/css handling and the improved caching were some of the big things for me. This might go hand in hand with the recent request to allow better in column customization of blocks and setting variable widths/columns.



Maybe cs-cart 3 is on the horizon (and before my 1 year maintenance is up)!



Truth be told there are a bunch of other things more important to me and others atm, but its worth mentioning.