The only thing I never liked about CsCart was its use of Smarty.
I know Smarty is supposed to be easier than CSS but I think using it is actually a major disadvantage.
1 - When it comes to making custom templates, it is clumsy and actually more difficult than CSS.
2 - We are limited in the developers we can tend projects to.
3 - It is slower than CSS.
I think switching to CSS would be a better idea, or even have support for Smarty and CSS Templates, a bigger developer pool would give us a greater variety of templates, the more developers templating would mean CsCart would become even more popular.
No offence, but you obviously don't know what you're talking about :)
Really? So you are saying there are no web based CMS that can build HTML and CSS templates? That you can't generate HTML and CSS code in Php? Smarty is simply a templating language designed to be easier for beginners to manage templates over php, practically anything it can do can be done in php or another web language.
I think the point is (from original post) that what smarty does can't be done via CSS. They provide two completely different elements of a page. CSS is for styling, Smarty is for control and generationof HTML (which contains php and css).
Of course PHP can generate html directly. All smarty is is a front-end to generating HTML with embedded PHP within a page (just go look at any compiled template).
Smarty is not really "for beginners", it is simply a language that allows you to control what's generated a lot easier and cleanly than other means. Yes there are other tools that do exactly the same thing but Smarty is fairly widely used and has been a pretty reliable framework in cs-cart since day one (like 10 years now).
I will admit that sometime cs-cart's use of smarty is a bit obtuse where they are really using it like subroutines (over use of capture tag), but for the most part, being able to simply include a template to get buttons and/or other common things generated automatically is a huge benefit to the maintainability of the product.
Note that it is all open source so if one wanted to add their own 'tags' or 'functions' they can do so within the framework. You could always start requesting smarty engine hooks if you think they're needed.