Designing with QuickSkin is easy and simple. It is the ultimate separate of Content from Layout. Skins are simple to design using basic tools like Microsoft FrontPage (or ExpressWeb) or Macromedia Dreamweaver.

QuickSkin is a Template Engine that was designed to support web based applications of any size. It is suited to small basic websites all the way up to large scale applications like Content Management Systems. It has many advantages over other templating systems including speed, small footprint, ease of use, and power.

Common template engines work like the following: Your PHP script specifies an HTML template and assigns some dynamic content to display. The template parser replaces all placeholders within the template with the assigned content and displays it to the user. This means a lot of string processing and regular expression work each time you want to display some content.

QuickSkin works like a 'template compiler' that converts templates into executable PHP code and stores it for later reuse. The first time a new template is processed, all placeholders in the template are replaced by small PHP code elements that print the assigned content. The HTML template fragment <H3></H3>, for example, is converted into something like <H3><?php echo $TITLE; ?></H3>. If you have assigned your content to the right variables, there is no need for any template parsing anymore. The only thing that has to be done is to include and execute the compiled template. This usually increases the execution time of the template engine dramatically.

QuickSkin supports:
– Simple Scalar Substitution (Strings, etc.)
– Block Iterations (nested Arrays / BEGIN..END)
– Basic Control Structures (IF..ELSEIF..ELSE)
– Custom Extension (Output filters, uppercase, sprintf, etc.)
– Template Compilation (HTML templates are converted to executable PHP Code)
– Output Caching (Accelerates your applications by reusing page output)
January 2009: QuickSkin is now PHP5 compliant and tested up to and including PHP 5.2.4. It is tested with E_STRICT.

How to use scalar substitution. The examples below use the mail encode scalar:
1 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com"}
2 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com","Your Name"}
3 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com","Your Name",true,'white'}
4 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com","Your Name",true,'white','font-size:18px;'}
5 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com","Your Name",true,'','font-size:18px;'}
6 - {mailtoencode:"yourname@yourdomain.com","Your Name",true,'white','font-size:18px;'}
and a test: {codesnippetstart:} <?php /* display some php code in here */ This can display any code snippet, special text, instructions, etc. ?> {codesnippetend:}
and here