you do not need smarty for that part , but it seems easyer to do that way :D
it all depends how you want to create things and for what purpose
if it is for your own , who cares about code as long you can figure out what does what
if it is also for other people , then it need to be nice and clean (unless you encode it ^^ )
also smarty works nice , but the sad part is that it is a lot more work to get smarty started , as all those variables also need to be defined , or the variable will not work
example
PHP Code:
$a= 1;
$b = $a++;
echo $b;
the value of B will be 2 ( a + a = 2 )
so if you do not define A and B , then the output will be nothing
same counts for smarty , and that is the part that need the most work
but on the end , it will be a lot easyer if you got a lot of templates
but only 1 template and 1 file that is the template then it is a waste of time to write so many code just to get that template a bit less messy
atleast that is my vieuw over it :D
then for the /?page=admin stuff
you can make it friendly by using htacces , then it still does not look messy ( put the friendly url in the html page like /pages/admin and htacces to redirect to /?page=admin )
Greetings From PowerChaos