I'm with you there...I like that Smarty covers up some of PHP's quirks, like htmlentities($var) vs urlencode($var) becoming {$var|escape:'html'} and {$var|escap

I'm with you there...I like that Smarty covers up some of PHP's quirks, like htmlentities($var) vs urlencode($var) becoming {$var|escape:'html'} and {$var|escape:'url'} respectively. There are also nice little shortcuts in Smarty, like wrapping templates in {strip}{/strip} to strip newlines and whitespace which would be tricky in PHP without using output buffering.