{"id":80,"date":"2013-08-16T10:44:43","date_gmt":"2013-08-16T10:44:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/?p=80"},"modified":"2015-08-20T11:30:38","modified_gmt":"2015-08-20T11:30:38","slug":"building-a-really-simple-php-templating-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/php\/building-a-really-simple-php-templating-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a really simple PHP templating engine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently I had to make use of templates in PHP, and as a lot of people on StackOverflow ([1]<\/a>, [2]<\/a>) suggested “you don’t need another templating engine like Smarty <\/a>on top of PHP, \u00a0as PHP itself is a templating engine”.<\/p>\n

So, I ended up making a simple function which looks like this:<\/p>\n

function getTemplate($file, $variables = NULL){\r\n    if (! is_null($variables))\r\n    extract($variables);\r\n\r\n    include(TEMPLATES_FOLDER . $file);\t\r\n}<\/pre>\n
TEMPLATES_FOLDER is a PHP constant<\/a>\u00a0which is defined in the config.php file like this:<\/p>\n
if ( !defined('ABSPATH') )\r\n\tdefine('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '\/');\r\n\r\ndefine(\"TEMPLATES_FOLDER\", ABSPATH . \"templates\/\");<\/pre>\n
So, for example a template may look like this:<\/p>\n
<!-- Navigation START -->\r\n<div class=\"navigation\">\r\n\t<div class=\"welcome\">Hi, <?=$user;?><\/div>\r\n\t<div class=\"nav\">\r\n\t\t<ul>\r\n\t\t\t<li><a href=\"home.php\" class=\"<? echo (isset($currentHome) ? 'current' : '') ?>\">Home<\/a><\/li>\r\n\t        <li><a href=\"members.php\" class=\"<? echo (isset($currentMembers) ? 'current' : '')  ?>\">Members<\/a><\/li>\r\n\t\t<\/ul>\r\n\t<\/div>\r\n\r\n\t<div class=\"clear\"><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<!-- Navigation START --><\/pre>\n
Here you can see the usage of ternary if operator<\/a>:<\/p>\n
echo (isset($currentHome) ? 'current' : '')<\/pre>\n
And a way to call this template from a home.php file would be:<\/p>\n
<? getTemplate(\"navigation.php\", array(\"user\" => getUser(), \"currentHome\" => true) ); ?><\/pre>\n
So the getTemplate() function loads the navigation.php file and passes it its variables “user” and “currentHome” which are then in the getTemplate() function extracted by using the extract()<\/a> function and echoed out. The currentHome variable is set \u00a0when called from the home.php file so that a template “knows” to set the “current” class to that element.<\/p>\n
Templating engines have their pros and cons, and since I didn’t need much leverage on the templating this proved to serve me just fine.<\/p>\n
What do you use for your template management in PHP?
\nLink to this article on CodeProject<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently I had to make use of templates in PHP, and as a lot of people on StackOverflow ([1], [2]) suggested “you don’t need another templating engine like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-80","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-codeproject","category-php"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikola-breznjak.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}