smarty/RELEASE_NOTES

1.4.0
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The most significant change to Smarty 1.4.0 is the compilation process. Instead
of compiling all the templates up front, it now compiles them at runtime. This
has several advantages. First off, there is no longer a need to have a single
template directory. You can now have arbitrary template sources, such as
multiple directories or even database calls. This also speeds the performance of
Smarty when $compile_check is enabled, since it is only checking the template
that is being executed instead of everything found in the template directory.
The $tpl_file_ext variable was removed since this is no longer needed, so
templates can be named anything you like with any extension. Smarty makes use of
the PEAR database abstraction class for obtaining templates from databases. Now
aren't you glad we require PEAR :-)

We also added a workaround for LOCK_EX on Windows systems, and changed a couple
of file permissions for better security on public servers. Thanks goes to
Fernando Nunes for his code contributions.

date_format, html_select_date and html_select_time used to require a unix
timestamp as the format of the date passed into the template. Smarty is now a
bit smarter at this. It will take a unix timestamp, a mysql timestamp, or any
date string that is parsable by strtotime, such as 10/01/2001 or 2001-10-01,
etc. Just give it a try and see what works.

When upgrading to 1.4.0, you will want to first clear out all your files in the
$compile_dir, since it now uses a new format. Since templates can come from any
source, the compiled versions have encoded names. Each file has a comment at
the top that states which resource was used as the source file. In unix, "head
-2 *" shows the first two lines of each file. If you have $compile_check set to
false and the compiled template does not yet exist, it will compile it
regardless of this setting. Once it is compiled though, it will not check to see
if recompilation is necessary.

-Monte