A Simple Yet Powerful PHP Template Engine
If you are in hurry, skip this to the meat.
It has been a while now since my last posting to this website. Due to busy schedule of my life I wasn't able to keep up the posting. While from the web stats I see quite large number of people coming to this website, I sincerely apologize for my inactivity.The main purpose of this website, as always, is to share programming goodies. So today I am going to toss you another one: my home-grown PHP template engine.
This is not yet another regular expression replacement template engine. The template engine uses PHP itself to render the template. The template itself is very intuitive to people who are already familiar with PHP. There is no extra learning for additional syntax - the template code itself is just plain PHP code. Though I haven't done any benchmark, from my past experience of using it, it is pretty fast - consider that it consists of less than 100 lines of code. Thinking of using Smarty?
In case you are not familiar with the idea of using templates in web development, here's a little brief: it's a practice of separating the presentation part of your code from the main flow of your code. Just to make your code more reusable and easier to read.
Quick Start
Here's our template file hello.php:
<h1>Hello World</h1> <p>This message is only for you <?php echo $name ?>.</p>
Load a template and assign variables to it, and render it:
require_once 'ctTemplate.class.php';
$html = ctTemplate::loadTemplate('hello', array(
'name'=>'test'
));
echo $html; //do whatever you want to it, output or even embed it to another template
//the output would be:
<h1>Hello World</h1>
<p>This message is only for you test</p>
That's it. You choose the template you want to render, and assign values to variables in the template. You now can use this presentation code for whatever purpose you want.
The Code
Let's take a look how it works.ctTemplate is the template engine class. It provides methods to load and render the PHP template. The first parameter of loadTemplate is the name of template you want to load, the second parameter is the variables you want to set in the template. After it has been called, loadTemplate returns rendered code.
The template is rendered in an isolated environment, meaning that the variables in the template will not collide with the variables from the context where the template is loaded. For example, let's use the hello.php template above:
$name = 'test';
//template hello.php can not see variable $name, resulting use of undefined variable warning
$html = ctTemplate::loadTemplate('hello');
//template hello.php can see variable $name, OK
$html = ctTemplate::loadTemplate('hello', array('name'=>$name);
Examples
Example 1
Load template and output it in one function call:
require_once 'ctTemplate.class.php';
ctTemplate::renderTemplate('hello', array(
'name'=>'test'
);
Example 2
Combine different templates:
//main PHP script
require 'ctTemplate.class.php';
$html = ctTemplate::loadTemplate('layout', array(
'title'=>'Test Template',
'content'=>ctTemplate::loadTemplate('hello', array('name'=>'test'))
));
echo $html;
Content of layout.php
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title><?php echo $title ?></title> </head> <body> <?php echo $content ?> </body> </html>
Content of hello.php
<h1>Hello World</h1> <p>This message is only for you <?php echo $name ?>
Example 3
Customize these options based on your needs:
require 'ctTemplate.class.php';
//set default directory where the template files are located
ctTemplate::setBaseDir('./templates');
//set default file extension of the template files
ctTemplate::setDefaultTemplateExtension('.tpl');
//this will load layout.tpl and hello.tpl under templates folder
$html = ctTemplate::loadTemplate('layout', array(
'title'=>'Test Template',
'content'=>ctTemplate::loadTemplate('hello', array('name'=>'test'))
));
echo $html;
Available Functions
Below are the methods exposed to public://load template public static function loadTemplate($template, $vars = array(), $baseDir=null); //load and output template public static function renderTemplate($template, $vars = array(), $baseDir=null); //set template path, default is the same directory as where the template engine class is public static function setBaseDir($dir); public static function getBaseDir(); //set default extension of the template, default is '.php' public static function setDefaultTemplateExtension($extension); public static function getDefaultTemplateExtension();
Download
Source CodePlease report any bugs you find in this script so I can improve it in the future. Any suggestion or idea are welcome. Just use the comment feature below. Thanks for reading.
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Awesome!
Seen it before a thousands of times, stop re-inventing the wheel. Honestly, just stop.
Браво, ваша фраза проÑто отличнаÑ
Hello, thanks for your good tips.
Hello,
thanks