Question

Although I don’t think the question was as good as it could be, let me try to explain better here.

I have a site using SMARTY 3 as the template system. I have a template structure similar to the below one:

/templates/place1/inner_a.tpl
/templates/place1/inner_b.tpl

/templates/place2/inner_b.tpl
/templates/place2/inner_c.tpl

/templates/default/inner_a.tpl
/templates/default/inner_b.tpl
/templates/default/inner_c.tpl

These are getting included on the parent template using

{include file="{$temp_folder}/{$inner_template}"}

So far great. What I wanted to do is having a default for, in the case that the file {$temp_folder}/{$inner_template} does not exists, it uses the equivalent file at default/{$inner_template}.

i.e. If I do {include file="place1/inner_c.tpl"}, since that file does not exists it in fact includes “default/inner_c.tpl”

Is it possible?

Answer 1

You’ll have to do it in php, smarty doesn’t have a way to check if a file exists.

You could write your own template handler too.

<?php
// put this function somewhere in your application

function make_template ($resource_type, $resource_name, &$template_source, &$template_timestamp,
&$smarty_obj)
{
    if( $resource_type == 'file' ) {
        if ( ! is_readable ( $resource_name )) {
            // create the template file, return contents.
            $template_source = "This is a new template.";
            require_once SMARTY_CORE_DIR . 'core.write_file.php';
            smarty_core_write_file( array( 'filename'=>$smarty_obj->template_dir . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . $resource_name, 'contents'=>$template_source ), $smarty_obj ); 
            return true;
        }
    } else {
        // not a file
        return false;
    }
}

// set the default handler
$smarty->default_template_handler_func = 'make_template';
?>