Smarty Purl Parameter Plugins

Smarty Purl Parameter Plugins is an open source, freely distributed and platform-independent web-based application implemented in PHP and designed from the ground up to be used as a plugin for Smarty to handle GET URL parameters.

It allows users to easily manage parameters for hyperlinks that are available in the Smarty template files. It is comprises of apurl and ppurl URL parameter plugins, which have been designed to handle the aforementioned situation.

Getting started with Smarty Purl Parameter Plugins

The plugin is quite easy to install, as you will have to download the latest tarball (TAR archive) from Softoware, save it on a location of your choice, extract its contents using an archive manager utility and move all the .php files from the ‘src’ directory into the Smarty plugin folder.

That’s it! After installation, you can verify if the plugin works by testing it in a blank page using the purl_test.tpl file found in the ‘test’ folder of the source archive. More details can be found on the project’s homepage (see link at the end of the article).

In order to have a link to a different document, but keep the exact same parameters included in the current page, do {ppurl path="other.php"}. Therefore, if the current URL was main.php?sid=658474679697&print=1, it will be transformed into other.php?sid=658474679697&print=1.

Under the hood

Taking a look under the hood of the Smarty Purl Parameter Plugins project, we can notice that it is comprised of three PHP files, which means that it is written entirely in the PHP server-side programming language.

Currently, the plugin is distributed on GitHub and has been successfully tested with the latest stable version of the Smarty PHP template engine, running on 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) Linux distributions.

What is new in this release:

• Changed default behaviour of ppurl: it now automatically creates GET parameters with correctly escaped & for valid html apurl does not do this and preserves the old behaviour, which means that the template variable typically should be piped through an escape routing like the modifier |escape:'html'
• Code is now licensed under the MIT license

Requirements:

• PHP