make sure view smarty is set up properly. and then your controller classes extend from Ant_Controller_Action.
Ant_View_Smarty class simply sets up the smarty template engine and interfaces it with Zend.
Ant_Controller_Action is same as Zend_Controller_Action, but uses our Smarty view.
The reason I did so was to have Zend_View like integration with smarty and the controller code would ber as much as possible similar to "real" code.
Also from smarty templates to access ZF functionality (helpers, filters) use {$view->xxx}
To get around viewRenderer I did this in my bootstrap file:
PHP Code:
$viewRenderer = Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker::getStaticHelper('viewRenderer');
$view = new Ant_View_Smarty();
$viewRenderer->setView($view)
->setViewSuffix('tpl');
this is tested and works fine with ZF 1.0 final.