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CodingBeagle
CodingBeagle

Reputation: 1950

Re-using PHP smarty master page logic across several .php pages

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So, I'm fairly new to web development in general, and I've hit sort of a funny problem.

Basically, I'm using the Smarty template engine with PHP to create a basic website. What I currently have is a master template, basically the parts of the website layout that have to be used on every single page of the website.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <title>Pet Nicknames!</title>
    <link href="styles/main.css" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

<body>  
    <div id="websiteBody">
        <div id="header">
        </div>

        <div class="menu">
            <div class="menuContainer">
                {foreach $menuButtons as $menuButton}
                    <a href="{$menuButton->link}"><div class="menuButton">
                        <span>{$menuButton->text}</span>
                    </div></a>
                {/foreach}
            </div>
        </div>

        <div id="content">
            {block name=content}{/block}
        </div>

        <div id="footer">
        </div>
    </div>
</body>

As you can see, this master template includes a foreach which basically just gets an array assigned from the "master.php" script, with an array of buttons retrieved from a database.

The problem is that now I want to create several PHP pages, but they should all re-use this template adn should all have to run the PHP script for retrieving the menu buttons.

I've made a block called "content" as you can see, and I was thinking of using template inheritance to do this... however I'm still unclear of how to properly re-use PHP logic such as for the menu, something that has to be re-used across basically all of the pages on the website, without having to include/repeat it in every PHP script.

What is a "standard" way around this problem in web design? Do you simply encapsulate this "setup" logic in a separate PHP script and include it in all scripts that need to use the master template?

Thank you all for the help!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 213

Answers (1)

Michal Przybylowicz
Michal Przybylowicz

Reputation: 1668

Cut the <div class="menu">...</div> and put it in separate template called menu.tpl now in place of this div ( in main template write ):

{include file="menu.tpl" menuButtons=$menuButtons}

file - The name of the template file to include

menuButtons - variable to pass local to template

Please check this doc for more info:

http://www.smarty.net/docs/en/language.function.include.tpl

Upvotes: 1

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