Hey guys! Wow I haven't been here in a long time.

Anyways, I need help deciding the best way to handle templates in PHP with MySQL. It is for a fairly large script / program I am making. I want to be able to add / edit / delete templetes from an ACP interface. I also want to be able to export and import templates (for skin sets). Very similar to IPB (you can add, edit, remove, import skin, export skin, etc), for those of you who have used it.

So how should I store the templates? I don't want it to be a big mess just to make a script that will export everything, etc. Should I store the templates in a MySQL database? Will that be too slow to load them on each load? Should I store them flat-file, if so, how?

Any advice / help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks so much!

It doesn't really matter how you store them. MySQL and flat-file will be almost equally fast (you won't see any difference as long as the MySQL database is on the same server or in the same server-network), it's parsing the template that takes time. I'd use Smarty to solve that problem (it parses the template only when it's changed, it uses a previously compild file otherwise.)

I use smarty for all my sites too, and it's excellent. It has some limitations, but it's very easy to extend with own plugins, so that's not a problem. It uses flatfiles by default, but it's possible to used templates stored in a MySQL database instead.