title: how to use Smarty better with PHP?
body: <p>I found that using Smarty with PHP, sometimes extra time will need to be used for</p>
  
  <p>1) using quite different syntax than PHP itself<br>
  2) need to check small cases, because documentation doesn't give finer details, such as for "escape"</p>
  
  <p><a href="http://www.smarty.net/manual/en/language.modifier.escape.php" rel="noreferrer">http://www.smarty.net/manual/en/language.modifier.escape.php</a></p>
  
  <p>it doesn't say escape:"quotes" is for double quotes only or for single quotes as well, so you need to write code to test it.  Also for the case of escape:"javascript" -- can't tell exactly what and how it is escaped.</p>
  
  <p>3) for something complicated, need to write helper functions or modifiers, so it needs a creation of new files and ending up doing it in PHP again.</p>
  
  <p>by the way, does using Smarty provide a good speed up over use PHP alone?  thanks.</p>