Answers.Body: <p>You are right, we <em>do</em> need some templating system and we don't <em>need</em> to replace smarty. It's just that it's not the framework that seems to have a lot of traction these days and as generally, we are thinking of moving away from it, we might as well start with the mail feature</p>
  
  <p>Moreover, I do recall performances issues being mentioned for big mailings (smarty was generating tons of temp files), so that might be another incentive.</p>
  
  <p>This being said, I the focus should be on improving the layout of transactional emails and make it easier to brand them consistently for an organisation, so replacing smarty might not be super useful in that context.</p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 3.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2016-03-11T10:07:06.050Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2016-03-11T10:07:06.050Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: Xavier
Body: <p>I'm looking at this GSoC project that I'm willing to take on.</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Google+Summer+of+Code+-+2016#GoogleSummerofCode-2016-responsivelayoutforemails" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Google+Summer+of+Code+-+2016#GoogleSummerofCode-2016-responsivelayoutforemails</a></p>
  
  <p>Which has "move away from smarty" on it's project description. Smarty, in the context of email messages, is used to replace the contact greeting names in email templates. So, I don't understand why we want to move away from smarty. Is it because we can accomplish the same task by using a simple PHP variable without having to use an extra library? What type of better solution are we looking for?</p>
  
Tags: <email><gsoc>
Title: Responsive Email Layouts - Why move away from Smarty?
ThreadText: # Responsive Email Layouts - Why move away from Smarty?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2016-03-10)
  
  I'm looking at this GSoC project that I'm willing to take on.
  
  <https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Google+Summer+of+Code+-+2016#GoogleSummerofCode-2016-responsivelayoutforemails>
  
  Which has "move away from smarty" on it's project description. Smarty, in the context of email messages, is used to replace the contact greeting names in email templates. So, I don't understand why we want to move away from smarty. Is it because we can accomplish the same task by using a simple PHP variable without having to use an extra library? What type of better solution are we looking for?
  
  **Tags:** email, gsoc
  
  
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  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_1 on 2016-03-11. Score: 2
  
  You are right, we *do* need some templating system and we don't *need* to replace smarty. It's just that it's not the framework that seems to have a lot of traction these days and as generally, we are thinking of moving away from it, we might as well start with the mail feature
  
  Moreover, I do recall performances issues being mentioned for big mailings (smarty was generating tons of temp files), so that might be another incentive.
  
  This being said, I the focus should be on improving the layout of transactional emails and make it easier to brand them consistently for an organisation, so replacing smarty might not be super useful in that context.
  
  
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