Bitweaver upgrade process

The particular target of my development work in the past couple of weeks has been to get bitweaver working with the current version of PHP - 8.4.5 - and the third party libraries that also support that. I am getting there, but need to review just where I am heading which is part of my bitweaver upgrade process. Push that back to the main codebase may not be appropriate at the moment, but actually a major part of the initial work was to move my own codebase back in line with the way the master thread had been taken. The live sites are still running a rather old configuration which is working fine, so the real questions is "Why Change It?". The answer to which is that others have been doing the heavy lifting to PHP8.4 and while I would be quite happy running 7.3, there are niggles that have been ironed out which I could simply port back to the old code, but contributing back is then somewhat restricted.

Now I just need to work out why Smarty 5 gots into an infinite loop when it calls the display function!