Today, websites are past the level of presenting summary and contact data for companies and projects. With the evolution of the Internet, most websites are now stand‑alone businesses rather than summary presentations of companies. More than that, complex applications' developers have embraced the idea of using websites as interfaces for their software.

For more than ten years, PHP has been one of the best choices for web developers being the most complete open‑source web programming language. With growth of the complexity of PHP applications, a new problem that was raised was, how to separate programmers' code (PHP) from designers' code (HTML), or better phrased, how to separate the content from presentation.

Smarty, a PHP templating system, was born to solve this problem.