May 12
PHP Templating
Many of you may have heard of SMARTY. I’ve used it once. I just think it makes
the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I suppose it is useful if you are
in a multi-programmer environment, but I would rather just use run of the mill
PHP rather than incorporating smarty templates.
Here is basically how I create every new website I do. I start by creating a
basic layout - or I could even purchase a cheap one from
basictemplates.com where all templates
are only $5. I also have a bunch on disk. I normally use these for ideas and
create a new one from scratch. I often use FrontPage 2003 and Adobe Photoshop to
help create the main template page, then I clean it up using
TextPad - my favorite text editor.
After determining where all the main content will be I will break the page apart
at that point into headers and footers.
Here is a basic example of what my header file will look like:
<html>
<head>
<title><?=$ptitle?></title>
</head>
<body>
My footer could be simply as follows:
</body>
</html>
Then, to create a new page, I would use the following template for each new
page:
<?
$ptitle = ‘Page Title’;
require ‘header.php’;
?>
Content goes here…
<?
require ‘footer.php’;
?>
That, in essence is simply all there is to it. You can make your header and
footer file as elaborate as you need to. Some things you may notice here are:
- I set the
$ptitlevariable in my page file. It is inserted
in the template between the title tags. - I use the
requirefunction to include the header and footer
files. You could also useinclude(),include_once(), or
require_once()
differences of these functions.
