Staring from day one of PDT project, a feature request screaming "Support smarty template syntax coloring" was very popular in our bug tracking system. Twenty-three people voted for this issue, many posts were written about it in the newsgroup and users keep sending us e-mails hoping their request is going to be fulfilled in the near future.
Well... if I understand the Eclipse Foundation correctly, PDT developers shouldn't operate fast and fix these kinds of features. PDT was built only as a "PHP Development Tools framework". In the PHP world where there are hundreds of core extensions and dozens of frameworks it is impossible to support all of them.
But... a feature request is a feature request. And feature requests are meant to be resolved. Applying simple logic rules derives that - "PDT Gets Smarty".
So the growing eco-system of PDT has a new sibling called 'smartypdt' which is a project that "enables users to develop Smarty projects utilizing the power of PDT" it is a great initiative developed by William Candillon , that was guided by me and we expect Dave Kelsey to join us soon. The results are really great!!!
For now two basic capabilities are provided: syntax coloring and compilation
error analysis. This makes PDT and smartypdt the best development environment
for Smarty developers.
The idea is that frameworks and extension creators will re-use the
functionality presented in this project and provide it alongside their products
to ease the development with PHP under PDT.
The package and source code can be accessed from here - http://smartypdt.googlecode.com/
You are more than welcome to test-drive it and submit bugs, features and patches.
