Using smarty variables in the database stored variables
 

I couldn't find this on the forum, so I'll post this in case any one looks for the answer.

I wanted to have $lng.txt_welcome to contain smarty tags, but when I tried that the tags were display literally instead of being interpreted.
The fix was to change:

$lng.txt_welcome

to

{eval var=$lng.txt_welcome}

good call, a few people have asked about this

A little more than 2 years later, this still works with 4.0.17 when placing that statement in welcome.tpl.

I successfully added the date to the home page. Good for letting people know your site is still alive.

{$smarty.now|date_format:"%A, %B %e, %Y"}