Templating
WordPress offers a templating system for implementing custom HTML and CSS, but it is not a templating system in the same sense as Smarty (http://www.smarty. net) or Perl’s Template Toolkit. Instead, like many PHP CMSs (most notably Drupal and Joomla!), WordPress templates are simply PHP fies that typically contain a mix of application logic and presentation code, for example, <div id=»footer»><?php wp_footer(); ?></div>. Compare that with a Drupal template excerpt: <div id=»footer»><?php print render($page[‘footer’]); ?></div> or with a MODx excerpt using Smarty placeholders: <div id=»footer»>[[*footer]]</div> and you can get some idea of the spectrum. Typically, the templates used in WordPress do not adhere to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, so they cause some developers to raise a critical eyebrow.
Be aware that your WordPress templates contain PHP code and that they do execute, so it is naturally possible to «crash» your templates, or to have complex loops and logical statements in them. As a developer, try your absolute best to separate logic from presentation and keep your templates as clean as possible. There are plenty of WordPress theme fies out there that contain a dizzying mess of PHP and HTML, which result in an unmaintainable no man’s land. Designers won’t touch them because they can’t decipher the myriad if-statements and sloppy concatenations, and developers won’t touch them for the same reason, or perhaps because they contain HTML and CSS that developers don’t want to worry about. In the end, just try to avoid the numerous pitfalls that exist in this type of templating system.