Hey Susanne,
thanks for this great article!

Greets,
Sebastian

Very nice. I really want to try Fluid outside of the Extbase scope in some projects of mine.

Great article. I am currently working on an extension that uses Fluid and it has never been easier to have data displayed on a TYPO3 website.

Fluid is a great template engine! Both with Extbase and with FLOW3!

Worked with Smarty before, but I found Fluid much easier to work with and really easy to extend with own ViewHelpers

Why oh why did you not go the way of Drupal and keep templates pure PHP? Why do I need to learn a cryptic templating language when 99% of all people dealing with Typo3 already are more or less fluent in PHP? Can someone please explain this to me?

I agree with Henrik, TypoScript proved to be powerful and useful, and it was worth learning, but I don't see the real advantages of Fluid, or anything else [besides PHP] that you have to spend another week on to get accustomed to it. And then you'll work on other projects based on different PHP mvc frameworks just to get back to TYPO3 and Fluid in another 2 weeks to notice that you've forgotten everything about Fluid. Please just stick to plain PHP we all love...

Ok, Smarty vs Fluid:
Don't forget this for the Fluid:
$this->objectFactory = t3lib_div::makeInstance('Tx_Fluid_Compatibility_ObjectFactory');$this->objectFactory->create($viewHelperName);

Properly written Smarty extension will require only
require_once('smarty_engine_class');

1. You still need "$addressObjects = [fetch data];" - no advantages.
2. foreach/if/ifelse/for do exist in Smarty for awhile.
3. What about Smarty's modifiers - there are tons of them, from formatting phone (with/wo extension to typo3 plug-ins), when you can put |format_phone and it will display something like +1 (880) 123-5678 from the just a string value?
4. Fluid foreach? Where's key, first, last? (yeah, maybe Fluid's FOR has it)

And so on, read http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Fluid and see how many PHP variable you have to assign before using it.