Template engines, in general, force clear separation of business logic and presentation, organise the project better, and allow people with no knowledge of PHP to work with HTML templates relatively easy.

Most of this can be also achieved when using PHP as a template language, but in our projects we tend to get easier / better view layers when using Smarty.

“Olemme käytännöllisiä järjestelmän valinnassa; jos asiakkaamme haluaa tai heidän täytyy käyttää tiettyä järjestelmää, opettelemme sen erityispiirteet ja toteutamme palvelut sen päälle.”

I am sure that you have search for the template engines. Here is some list of those with few comments: http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/19-promising-php-template-engines/ I do agree with those that consider PHP5 as the best template engine. I do not always see the benefit of using some processing between data and templates in non-PHP5 way. There are pro’s and con’s using XSLT or other XML based templating. I wonder what the problem is that they try to resolve… Maybe converting XML to any of the popular Internet types like PDF, text versions of the page, etc. But how often that can be implemented inside XSLT based templating layer? I just would go with the PHP5 and build those few necessary classes required to do templating. But again, there might be other business requirement I am not aware of.

However, we consider Drupal to be a better fit for most of our customers — as we are doing complex sites that have a lot of user generated content or social media features. The ecosystem around Drupal is simply better for us and our clients in these scenarios.

Joomla! has its strengths over other systems, and thus we have adopted it for certain types of customers that are not served well by Drupal (expert admin UI) or eZ Publish (too much functionality).

Anyhow, we do not select the technology just by its own merits, but also through market adoption, customer awareness, and availability of developers in Finland. For those, WordPress, Drupal Joomla!, and eZ Publish (in this order) seem to offer the best toolset for us to be offered to our customers.

We have looked around quite much for good systems, and will take a second look to Elgg, but we need also to limit our platforms — otherwise we cannot master them deeply enough.

Speaking of CodeIgniter templates; the first thing we did with CI was to bolt Smarty template engine to replace CI’s own view system. That was almost three years ago and Smarty is showing some age, so any pointers to better ones (we’ve identified a couple) are welcome.

I would assume, that you really have not evaluated all the CMS’s ( as your post does not mention the biggest one ), but you just must use some of them for external reasons. And that is why you have only subset of CMS’s and frameworks mentioned.

How ever I totally agree the thing between the lines in the post: there is alwys freedom to architect extensions in such manner that they do not completely rely on the framework used, and there for are more portable.

Drupal: lacks modern object oriented concepts and is there for too old.EzPublish: no wide community support, has weird structure in its code base – not a very architectural framwork.CodeIgniter: does not even have built in master templating system, what’s that about!

Joomla, Elgg, some others, are just more modern and probably will be winners in CMS competition, if there is such competition going on.

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