As I mentioned yesterday, I'm now using Smarty to provide pagination in my category archives. The code is inserted directly into the template, and (apparently) when it rebuilds the template it parses that code prior to rendering the page. It's actually quite impressive. Thanks again to Brad, not only for giving me some sample code with which to play, but for showing me it is possible in the first place - I had no idea!
As mentioned previously, using Smarty for pagination isn't difficult. Of course, the simple example already given doesn't really do much - your users would still need to know about it, and manually construct the URL. That wouldn't be much fun. Using Smarty, we can do the work for them!
One of the things that bothered me about the switch to dynamic archives is that I had to stop using the Compare plugin, since it doesn't support dynamic publishing (or didn't, at any rate). With the use of Smarty, you can very easily reproduce this functionality, and though I haven't done any benchmarks or anything, I suspect that the performance gains are dramatic.
