PHP Templating

Templating can be very simple with PHP, no other frameworks needed for basic templates.

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:

1<html>
2<head>
3<title><?=$ptitle?></title>
4</head>
5<body>

My footer could be simply as follows:

1</body>
2</html>

Then, to create a new page, I would use the following template for each new page:

1<?php
2$ptitle = 'Page Title';
3require 'header.php';
4?>
5Content goes here...
6<?php
7require 'footer.php';
8?>

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 $ptitle variable in my page file. It is inserted in the template between the title tags.
I use the require function to include the header and footer files. You could also use include(), include_once(), or require_once(). See php.net for the differences of these functions.