Loading your own namespace would not prevent PHPTAL's built in attributes, I
think.
But note that registering namespace costs much to load PHPTAL's parser engine.
So I'm using pre-filter mechanism to load my namespace classes because
PHPTAL_PreFilter class is very small and not related to other
Your class can be called whatever you wish and can be either manually required
before first use or loaded using any available autoloader. You can put it
wherever you like :)
We work heavily with Zend Framework and so use autoloaders and Symphony has a
similar system but feel free to keep