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Somehow, I managed to miss Harry's Templates and Template Engines on phpPatterns. While it may have been written a few years back, I believe the points he makes are just as valid today as they were then.

I have nothing against templating engines like Smarty (which we use at Digital Web). What I really don't understand is why there is a need to add yet another layer of complexity on top of PHP when PHP is already a language designed for combining markup and logic. The standard argument is we should separate the programming logic of our Web applications from the markup. Much like we should separate markup from presentation using CSS. And I'm all for that. Search for modular php markup on Google and see what you find.

Have you ever studied one of these templates? Let's have a look at an example.