PHP Templating

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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:

<?php
$ptitle = 'Page Title';
require 'header.php';
?>
Content goes here...
<?php
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 $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.