A lot of template engines seem to either go for "FULL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE POWER!" or "NO LOGIC! LOGIC IS EVIL!", but I've found that the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle - you have enough power in the templates to do cool stuff without polluting your controllers, but it uses a language designed for templating and not a general purpose language shoehorned into HTML tags, and doesn't give you features you'll definitely never need.
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Jinja2? http://jinja.pocoo.org/
A lot of template engines seem to either go for "FULL PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE POWER!" or "NO LOGIC! LOGIC IS EVIL!", but I've found that the sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle - you have enough power in the templates to do cool stuff without polluting your controllers, but it uses a language designed for templating and not a general purpose language shoehorned into HTML tags, and doesn't give you features you'll definitely never need.
Here here, the Django/Jinja model for templating is so much nicer than dealing with partials in every template