Guide 02 · Developer docs

Core dna renders server-side sites with Smarty or with Twig, one engine per site, and treats the two as peers. This guide is the one place both are documented: what they share, each engine's language and the platform's additions and limits, the two side by side, and translation.

L1–L2

Unit 04 of 05 3 pages

Comparing and porting

Updated 23/10/2026 01:49

The two engines next to each other: one equivalence table, the behaviour that differs beyond syntax and causes visible bugs, and a procedure for moving a site from one engine to the other in either direction.

This is the practical unit, for developers who read both dialects, review each other's work across engines, or move a site from one to the other. It treats the engines as peers: each has things the other lacks, and each list comes with the nearest equivalent in the other engine.

Smarty and Twig side by side is the reference: one row per construct, each with an id to link to, then what only Smarty has and what only Twig has. Behaviour that differs between the engines covers the four differences that cause visible bugs, beginning with escaping, which on Core dna is off in both. Porting a template set gives the order of work for a change of engine and a way to estimate it from the site's own templates.

In this unit

Read in order

01 Smarty and Twig side by side Every common construct in Smarty and in Twig, one row each, as the platform runs them: output, filters, conditions, loops, assignment, inheritance, includes, comments, whitespace and each platform helper. Then what only one engine has, with the nearest equivalent in the other. 02 Behaviour that differs between the engines The differences between Smarty and Twig on Core dna that cause visible bugs beyond syntax: escaping, which is off in both, what an include sees, what an undefined variable or a missing method does, and how compiled templates behave on production, with the symptoms of each and how to test for them. 03 Porting a template set Moving a site from Smarty to Twig, or back, ports every template and ships in one deploy, because the engine is one setting. A procedure for either direction: inventory the constructs, keep file names, handle escaping, then translation, then scope, then compare rendered pages.

Objects ReferenceGenerated from the platform, so it is always current

API ReferenceEvery REST endpoint, in cURL, PHP, Python and JavaScript

Comparing and porting

In this unit