I considered smarty, but I personally dislike it, and I could do a much better job doing it using straight PHP in the template files (which I don't want to do).

What I'm trying to achieve is a Wordpress like system, where all you have is the code for the actual loop, an if statement, then the variables/functions within the loop. However, the trouble I'm having is actually making the loop and using a loop to output a list of products from the database.