I posted a related question on a Smarty forum but got no answers.

Does anyone have any good examples of including a template within another template? {include} might be the way, but it's a bit of a hassle to pass all the variables through.

Could I call a template from my _smarty_variables() function and then put the result into a string variable, instead of outputting it? This is another way I could get this to work, and it may be simpler.