Developing Smarty application is a little tough using WYSIWYG IDEs because when using smarty template variables (such as reference to an image), it can not be represented in a WYSIWYG environment because there are no IDEs that support the SMARTY templates unless I'm mistaken.

I use Dreamweaver MX and mapped all the smarty tags and it looks OK but when you have:

<{$xoops_imageurl}/images/logo.gif>

the IDE doesn't know what to do with that. Sure, you can put absolute values there temporarily but then what's the point?

If someone can shed some light on this matter it would be appreciated

Since the SMARTY tags are configurable in the Smarty class, it's hard to do a proper IDE; the <{variable}> tag used in XOOPS, for instance, is not the default SMARTY tag - that's {variable}