codeigniter (smarty alternatives?)

I want to start learning php and have been looking at the codeigniter framework is there any alternatives to smarty that can be integrated with it?
I like the idea of shortened php code with smarty but I don't like having to deal with TPL files when designing "The reason I don't use wordpress"

 

You should be able to use standard html in the view. As far as I know there's no reason you much use smarty or any other templating system.

http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/general/views.html

 

There are no .tpl files in Codeigniter. Just write your HTML and use your View sub-classes to output the pages. You can freely pepper your view html with regular PHP (with added goodies from Codeigniter).