Why should you use a template system?
Well, when you start to work on a large website you'll know what I'm talking about.
If you website if not well organized, at some point you will get lost in it, from a developer perspective I mean.
There are many php template systems, and the most used are: Smarty, patTemplate, phpSavant, etc.
I have worked with all of these, but phpSavant is the one I prefer.
Why? Because you don't have to learn a new syntax for template files.
If you use Smarty or patTemplate for example, you have to learn a new syntax, and why do that if php is a template system itself?
Next, I'm going to show you how to create your custom template system.
Most of the web pages contain the next modules:
- header
- left column
- content
- footer
Header, left column and footer they all remain the same, and only content module is changing.
Suppose you have website cotaining the following pages:
Home, Profile and Products.
You don't want to create full pages for each one of these pages, you want to reuse code.
And there is at least one good reason: if you want to change your website structure, you'll have to change each file, but if you structure your website this way, you only need to make the changes in one place.
So basically header.php will look something like this:
- <html>
- <head>
- <title>My website name</title>
- </head>
- <table>
- <tr>
- <td colspan="2">My company name here - header content</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td>
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left_column.php looks like this:
- <table>
- <tr>
- <td><a href="index.php?page=home">Home</a></td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td><a href="index.php?page=profile">Profile</a</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td><a href="index.php?page=products">Products</a</td>
- </tr>
- </table>
</td>- <td>
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We include our template files here
And finally the footer.php:
- </td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td colspan="2">Footer content goes here</td>
- </tr>
- </table>
- </body>
- </html>
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In templates directory we keep our template pages, in our case: home.php, profile.php, products.php
And now, the main file index.php
- <?php
- if( isset( $_GET['page'] ) )
- {
- $template = $_GET['page'] . '.php';
- if( !file_exists( 'includes/templates/' . $template ) )
- {
- $template = 'file_not_found.php';
- }
- }
- else
- {
- $template = 'home.php';
- }
include_once( 'includes/header.php' );- include_once( 'includes/left_column.php' );
- include_once( 'includes/templates/' . $templatetemplate );
- include_once( 'includes/footer.php' );
- ?>
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If no page is given, then home.php will be our default page. Also if an invalid page is given, we will display file_not_found.php template file, which can contain an error message like 'Page not found.'
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