PHP is getting serious. For a long time it required a great deal of work to structure a large PHP application into a maintainable form, and every developer did it in his own 'special' way. Projects like phpGroupWare produced frameworks for plugging applications into an assembly but apparently failed to evolve the definitive pattern for writing a generic PHP site.

Now Smarty has arrived and has quickly become the definitive templating solution. This is a good thing, more because of the pattern it presents rather than the specific solution (since with discipline plain PHP can make a good templating language). Smarty nicely covers the V of MVC, and a good C comes in the form of Phrame, which is a PHP port of Java's popular struts framework. A nice simple M is left as an exercise for the reader, but plain objects and arrays work well for the majority of PHP applications.