I am working on a medium sized app and i have around 30 views to serve in all. I am just using the codeigniters view layer without any template engine integration like smarty and stuff. For me this works best as its simple and easy. But all around the web i see people going cray about using template engine in their views which made me think am i sane enough to just use the codeigniters view layer for an app like this.
So far i havent run into any problems other than using some (sometimes a lot) conditionals in certain views. But if there are any one who ve used just the codeigniters view layer for apps currently in production id love to hear their story. I am almost done with this app and might move to production if i feel that wat i ve done is sane enough.
Ive already seen in SO that people suggesting smarty or williamconcepts template engine to go with codeigniter but all i wanna hear is am i good to go with the native view layer of CI.
In my opinion templates are old school now …
Codeigniter’s user guide first page says you may want CI if
You do not want to be forced to learn a templating language (although a template parser is optionally available if you desire one).
Personally I have found using templates annoying in development (used smarty a long time back), they have a different syntax and they can’t be debugged using a debugger.
Now as you asked, yes I have used a very high traffic eCommerce portal and it worked without issues for a good amount of traffic. To further improve the response we implemented memcached later which too worked like charm !