I needed to assign a block of content to a variable instead of just a value.. so i set about creating this plugin function smarty_block_assign_content($params, $content, &$smarty) { $smarty = clone($smarty); //Copy the original class, so there's no garbage variables after we finish if(!isset($content)) return; if (!isset($params['var'])) { $smarty->trigger_error("assign_content: missing 'var' parameter", E_USER_WARNING); return; } [...]