A lot have been discussed, but anyway it is still difficult to decide. A project is to be developed, and more persons will have to work at it. Those persons will have some experience in ZF and probably also in Smarty. The problem is: what are the advantages and disadvantages of using ZF Template Engine vs. Smarty. How much of you use Smarty? Why do you prefer Smart/Zend_View?
I think the greatest advantage to using a non-PHP templating engine in your view layer is that you can force logical isolation between your designers and your programmers. This is especially important if you have untrusted or external designers providing input for your product. I.e., you do not want your designers to be able to do things like this in a view template:
<?php
unlink('/path/to/file');
$db = new PDO('...');
$db->query('drop table ... ');
?>
Cheers,
Alex
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