That's what I was recommending as well. Plus, by using directly PHP you also have all the language structures that PHP provides you: like initializing objects, calling they're methods, looping structures, and so on. That is:

1. hard to accomplish using another meta language for your templates
2. uselessly slow (I'm not talking about 1 template file with 100 lines. what do you do when you combine 7 different template files to make one big template, and then parse that (which let's say has 3000 lines). believe me, you will notice a decrease in performance there). you don't have to transform the php code to another language just so that you can transform it back into php later. I once tried to make a templating system myself, and finally got back to using php templates because of all the stuff that needed replication (like an if-else statement, or a while loop).

ChrisR: that's the "long form" of the for, foreach, while, switch.

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