[PHP] PHP, Smarty, and Text

[Daniel Kolbo]

Hello,

I've been using PHP and Smarty for several years now and I am happy with 
this "division" of data from presentation.  With this philosophy in 
mind, i am a bit perplexed as to how to handle the text on my sites.  
That is, the text is data, so i am motivated to store the text in a 
database, files, or the like, but then text is loaded with little markup 
nuances (random italics/weight/colors, etc...) that make template design 
rather ugly.  This motivates me to put markup (maybe even my own brand 
of markup) around the text, and to store this markup-text combination in 
a database.  But I don't like this either, because a lot of the people 
writing the content/text know word/writer not markup.  So i am motivated 
to have them save their text as .html, and I parse this file and modify 
accordingly.  However, i don't like this either as not all word/writer 
styles are 1-to-1 with CSS.  Without any options I am back to thinking 
"hard code" the text with markup in included templates, but it hurts 
just thinking of updating/modifying.

I have looked (briefly) at Web Content Management Systems, but this 
seems like overkill really, maybe i'm ignorant.

What would the community suggest?  The text can take on many forms, 
introduction text, about text, product information, articles, blurbs, 
(some changes daily, some doesn't) etc...where does all this text live 
in 'properly' designed site.

Thanks in advance,
dK