CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phptemplates
Moses
Moses

Reputation: 9183

Creating a custom PHP template

I created a custom PHP templating system and the way I built it seems, well, inefficient. The three main goals for my template was to:

  1. Pull all site-wide HTML elements from a template.tpl include.
  2. Be able to dynamically assign content in the template.tpl (like <title> or <script>)
  3. Be as efficient and scalable as possible.

In the end, my template system looked something like this:

randomPage.php

<?php
// declare any page specific resources
$pageTitle = "Random Sub-Title";
$pageResources = "/css/someRandomCSS.css"
$pageContent = "/randomPage.tpl"
// include the generic page template
include dirname($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']).'/includes/template.tpl'
?>

randomPage.tpl

<h1><?=$pageTitle?></h1>
<p>Some random page's content</p>

template.tpl

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
   <title>My Site -- <?=$pageTitle?></title>
   <link href="/css/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
   <link href="<?=pageResources?>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">
</head>
<body>
   <? include $pageContent ?>
</body>
</html>

The main problem with this system is that for every web page, I need to manage two files: one for logic/data and the other for the page template. This seems largely inefficient to me, and doesn't seem like a very scalable approach.

Recently, I come across the smarty framework, which would allow me to consolidate my system from randomPage.php and randomPage.tpl into something like:

randomSmartyPage.php

{extends file="template.tpl"}
{block name=pageTitle}My Page Title{/block}
{block name=pageResources}
   <link href="/css/someRandomCSS.css" rel="stylesheet" text="text/css">
{/block}
{block name=pageContent}My HTML Page Body goes here{/block}

Seeing this approach raised three major questions for me:

  1. Are there any fundamental flaws with how I am approaching my templating system?
  2. Can my original php code be refactored so I don't have to create two files for every web page?
  3. Would using the smarty (or perhaps an alternative framework) be a good idea in this case?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5019

Answers (2)

Khez
Khez

Reputation: 10350

The approach you are describing is part of MVC design pattern. Separating the different aspects of your application.

What you seem to have already understood is that PHP is a templating system in itself as have many others before you.

Take a look at this benchmark for a rough comparison of popular template systems.

Update 2022.08.29

Updated broken links to archived versions.

Note: The answer remains valid if you're trying to learn the language. But for anything serious, consider using a framework.

Upvotes: 2

alex
alex

Reputation: 490557

  1. Your code isn't really using any templating engine besides PHP itself, which is fine. A flaw I can see is your template will have access to all variables, and the ones you create for it are all global.
  2. Two files is a good system, one to change what is preprocessed and passed to the view, and one for the view itself, containing HTML or whatever. This allows you to easily swap views, for example, a view for standard browsing and a mobile view for mobile browsers.
  3. It can be a good idea, but I'm a firm believer that using PHP is good enough.

Here is an example, untested. It will encapsulate all the variables so you don't pollute the global namespace.

index.php

function view($file, $vars) {
    ob_start();
    extract($vars);
    include dirname(__FILE__) . '/views/' . $file . '.php';
    $buffer = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();
    return $buffer;
}

echo view('home', array('content' => Home::getContent()));

views/home.php

<h1>Home</h1>
<?php echo $content; ?>

Upvotes: 8

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