I used Postgres when I first started out in ~2002 but it was slow, really slow, I switched to MySQL and it was fast and the customers happy. The MyISAM table engine was shit hot(fast) but it took me years to get my head around constraints and then indexes etc to actually get a basic level of competence and realise MyISAM was a bunch of trade off's for performance. Anyway I loved PG and still do romanise it.. what if I stayed.. what could have been.. but it didn't get the job done, for me.

Edit: oh yeah Smarty is still a thing and so is PHPClasses.org whilst I think about it.. I've nothing against PHPClasses apart from it tries to pass itself off as something other than it is.. an amateur coders exchange.