Adding PHP code

[Aviationguy]

I have been reading up on PHP code and wanted to add a hit counter to my page. I found some examples of code so I tried adding it to main.php and nothing happened. I tried others and nothing so I put in this bare bones statement:

<?php
$counterVal=1501;
echo "You are visitor number $counterVal to this site";              
?>   

Nothing fancy but also nothing on my page.  My question is, why can't I add this code and see the result on my page?

I appologize if this is not appropriate for this forum.  If it is, just delete me.

[bsmither]

You have a good understanding of PHP pages. However, CubeCart uses Smarty as a template rendering engine, and the skin templates - although suffixed with .php - never actually gets processed by PHP. Or anything at all, actually, other than Smarty*.

Smarty will 'compile' the template and in so doing, will ignore everything that is not tightly enclosed within braces ({ and }). The result is sent directly out. Thus, the web browser, seeing <?php whatever ?> in the HTML code will do nothing with this as this is not a valid HTML markup tag.

So, when using Smarty to render templates, one needs to give to Smarty the value of a variable, and code the variable into the template.

*One can ask the web server to deliver the template directly (www.mystore.com/skins/foundation/templates/main.php). Since the templates do have the suffix .php, the web server will first send the template file to PHP for processing. In this scenario, the PHP code will be executed.

 

[Aviationguy]

Thanks.