I was setting up for some code today. Code which would use, among other things, Smarty 3, since that’s a thing now apparently. (It used to be Smarty 2, but I guess times change and numbers change.)

There’s an __autoload function that I wrote a while ago and often use to, you know, automatically include files when instantiating classes. But it didn’t work at all. The file itself included fine, but the autoload function was not being called.

Jeff and I eventually traced this back to one line in my code — the line including the Smarty source file.

So I had a look in there and found this:

/**
 * register the class autoloader
 */
if (!defined('SMARTY_SPL_AUTOLOAD')) {
    define('SMARTY_SPL_AUTOLOAD', 0);
}
if (SMARTY_SPL_AUTOLOAD && set_include_path(get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . SMARTY_SYSPLUGINS_DIR) !== false) {
    $registeredAutoLoadFunctions = spl_autoload_functions();
    if (!isset($registeredAutoLoadFunctions['spl_autoload'])) {
        spl_autoload_register();
    }
} else {
    spl_autoload_register('smartyAutoload');
}

Which looked suspiciously culpable. So I added this line to my code:

spl_autoload_register('__autoload');

And then it worked!