PHPLIB templates can grant you an amazing ability to abstract the manipulation of data (in the database as well as in PHP) from its final format, whether that format is HTML, XML, WML, or a formatted e-mail, and some of these ways will be explored here.
At its heart, PHPLIB's template class works by defining variables that you stuff information into.
Although variables can be defined in any number of ways, it is important to remember that, once defined, all variables are dealt with in exactly the same way.
As with any programming language, variables contain information of some kind, and most of working with this templates class is defining what the variables are, what you want in them, and how you are going to assemble these variables into some output.
Once again, don't forget that these variables, once defined, are just logical buckets into which we'll dump text. Variables consists of strings of text, which can contain still other variables inside of which we can put more text.
This means that variables frequently exist "inside" others, much like directories can be contained in other directories.
