Creating a php template system

Note that we have included the '. By using this method, we also benefit from using standard html designs for the pages. Hint: You can change the extension of the pages as you wish. Further more if you want to use different extensions for different pages, just delete the. Do not forget that in this case, when requesting the page you will have to provide the extension.

That is: putting php code in your pages will not work. If you need to use any php code, either add it to your 'index. Hint: You can still add java code since this is executed on the client's side! You can use it to request pages in deeper folders in your website. Also, it is good for the tutorial purposes so you can practice more options and extend based on this! Please check the url and try again! Print an error statement!!! In our case here to the main page. This could be your error page, but it is convenient to go to the main page in this case because that is how the index file is translated on servers.

It is the main page! The '!! This becomes handful if you want to add any content that you want to change more often. For example, you can create a text file and put inside it your add sense code, create a place holder for it, add a similar line of code to this one, then add your place holder to the right or left column to see it on all pages instantly.

Extending Functionality and Usability : To make this even greater, we can make our links static and search engine safe. Create a. For example, let's say you want to transfer your design to another domain name, and you want to change the links to the domain name instantly. This can be a hard task if you have to change it page by page. To easily do this, make it a variable, and this is how it is done: Add the following code to your 'index.

Conclusion : This tutorial is designed for total beginners, it is simple yet very powerful and could be a base for very large and complicated systems that want to offer an easy way for their clients to design their script.

Many scripts have great functionality, but when it comes to the design templating they lack this important feature, or when they have the templating system, the templating system is usually very hard to manipulate for un-experienced users.

Using this method will separate the script code from the design. This separation is useful in numerous ways. One very important issue is when modifying the design you don't have to worry about the code! I hope this tutorial has been useful for some one. Feel free to use it in your scripts and designs even the commercial ones. However the script and tutorial files included are not for resale or distribution without our permission and it is only fair and polite to credit and reference this page!

Web developement, professional website templates, web hosting, web directory, article directory, webmaster resources and tools. Sign in Email. A little explanation on magic methods: they are called when you try to read or write to nonexistent properties of the class. You can read more on this topic in the chapter on overloading in the official PHP manual. Invoking our library is straightforward.

If you have basic knowledge of PHP, you can imagine how this works. Some logic is being used to set the variables, to read them from the database and so on, and then these variables are passed to the object of our view class.

From one set of variables, you can generate many different views. The Twig library basically does the same job as the simple example above, but in a more sophisticated way. It has many useful features that enable you to develop and maintain your projects more easily and quickly.

Twig requires PHP 5. The easiest way to get it is to clone the repository on GitHub:. Once the library is installed, you can start playing with it. Notice that we have to provide the proper path to the Autoloader. This piece of code enables us to use all of the Twig libraries without having to explicitly include them.

You should be familiar with this technique if you use other popular libraries or frameworks such as Zend Framework and PEAR. The next essential part of the Twig library is the loader. This is a class that tells the Twig engine how it should load the templates.

With the object of this class, we can initialize the main part of the engine, the Twig environment. An instance of the loader class is used to initialize the Twig environment as its first parameter.

The second parameter is an array of options. The most important of them are these:. For a parameter, you can provide a single string variable or if you have two or more directories with template files an array of strings. In such situations, Twig looks for the requested template files in the same order as the paths appear in the array.

This can be useful if you store your templates in some form other than files in a file system for example, if you generate them dynamically, store them in the database, store them in some cache, etc.

Twig is able to speed things up by caching your templates. Pure PHP code is generated and stored in the cache directory. So, how do we display our first template?

First, prepare your template file. It will be very simple, because it contains only the basic output:. Save this file in the templates directory.

The convention is to save a template with the. Its content will be as follows:. In this code, the Twig autoloader is included and registered. In the next step, the environment is initialized with the previously created loader. As a result, the following code is sent to the browser:. Nothing could be simpler. Just prepare the XML template, like so:. Save it as, say, hello. To generate the result, just load this file instead of index.

Learn more. PHP - Creating a custom templatesystem? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 1 month ago. Active 11 years, 1 month ago. Viewed times. So, i have a. You're just creating dozens of new problems rather solving any. As long as you have to ask such questions, you shouldn't go into designing your own templating system, but reuse some of the existing ones which were built by experienced developers. PHP is a template system.

Use PHP. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Roman Roman 3, 4 4 gold badges 27 27 silver badges 41 41 bronze badges. On the other hand - smarty template engine was made to simplify designer's life. RobertPitt RobertPitt Also, don't use a double underscore prefix for your names. They're reserved for PHP. Meagar, Firstly that's for the up vote, and using double underscores would have no effect here because firstly there variables, and i dont think PHP Has any magic vars, secondly im specifically looking in the object scope, i.

Freddie Freddie 1, 2 2 gold badges 15 15 silver badges 23 23 bronze badges. I want to create everything myself in this project, and this shouldn't really be that hard, right? I mean, it doesn't look very complicated - it's just a matter of finding a way to do it. It also feels kind of unnecessary to use a template engine like smarty for my project.

It's unnecessarily big for what i need it for. And i still believe it isn't that hard, there's probably a ton of different solutions for this, and some of them will be simple. So you're saying people can't ask simple questions? Show 1 more comment. Hope this is helpful. Liam Liam 1, 1 1 gold badge 16 16 silver badges 28 28 bronze badges. I thought of something like that, but i didn't manage to eval it because of the html code around it.