Hi again , this is my first post so I hope this question is in the right place, if it's not please mods move it to the right place :) ..

as a web developer, I seem to evolve on a path which goes like this ..

1. Write HTML Pages and add PHP tags into them
2. Realize on a large scale, this is going to be hard to maintain
3. Learn about MVC and start to think it's cool
4. Trying smarty templating engine ..

Basically, the way of templating engine works like this ( in my understanding ) :
a) do code in PHP
b) Call smarty and fill in the variables in a template
c) Send the output

please Correct me if I'm wrong ..

but then again, I think step a and b already use a lot of processing time .. if I have much bigger application I don't know how much process and took time..

I need advice, I'm doing some project with team in it at office and it seems to be large application. I need advice on method how am I gonna do it ? some say MVC is bad, some say it's not ..

Bear in mind, I'm newbie .. All I can do is procedural coding, a little bit of OOP ...

thanks in advance