smarty is the grand father of template frameworks. I hated it the first time I lay eyes on smarty code around 2007-8. Thankfully it has gone extinct. I have seen 100s of template frameworks & MVC frameworks in PHP. Hate them all. The most complicated I saw was Typo3. It had 6 or 7 layers of template parsing in between. 23 years career in PHP coding... I am a purist. Hate the Javascript template frameworks too... jquery, Angular...etc