31.10.11
In most cases Smarty tags will be sufficient, but when you need a quick and dirty solution in the template, this is the way to access the variables stored in the smarty object:
{php}
$myVariable = $this->get_template_vars('myVariable');// get from smarty
// do your thing with $myVariable in PHP
$this->assign('myVariable', $myVariable);// overwrite smarty var
{/php}
