Skinning

Cagez

How do various PHP software skinning and template engines work? Like {this.name} turns into "Blah Blah" ? Through preg_replace?

Duey

thats how I do it, but remember if you are using lots of preg_replace it is more efficent to use str_replace

Cagez

So you just go through the entire file doing preg_replace's or str_replace? Simple enough... 😃

feldon23

There's a million ways.

You could have your page like:

<?php
require('themetop.php');
?>
.
.
<!-- usual html or php stuff here -->
.
.
.
<?php
require('themefoot.php');
?>

and then put background colors, title/head tags, various other settings, and your body tag in themetop.php and your copyright notices, etc. in themefoot.php.

Then all these pages you are producing with the 2 requires are "portable" and can be moved from one folder to another and if each folder has different versions of themetop.php and themefoot.php, then the page will change in appearance.

As for search/replace/regex, there's a million ways.

You could use heredoc notation.

<?php
// define all your variables up here.

$data=<<<QQQ
<html>
<head><title>{$pagetitle}</title></head>
<body background=FFFFFF text=000000>
<center><h1>Welcome to {$pagename}'s Web</h1></center>
.
.
.
</body>
</html>
QQQ;

echo QQQ;
?>

Note that heredoc does not allow any kind of evaluation within the structure. You must prepare all your data BEFORE the heredoc construct so that these values are ready to be inserted with the {} notation.

And then there are, of course, the aforementioned str_replace and regex version.

Duey

another way would be to add {tag} to a database and while the str_replace 🙂 less code

Weedpacket

When the skinning is a matter of colour scheme or layout, without altering the content of the page any, then the ideal solution would be to provide alternate stylesheets, and only do content-specific stuff in the templates (so that no matter what the "skin" is, you use the same HTML template for the page). Needless to say, the CSS itself could be template-driven (e.g., identical layouts, just with different colour schemes).

Of course, with so many existing browsers still out there with badly broken standards support (NS4 (which is excused on the grounds of having been written before the standards existed), IE6/Win (which is not)), this is something of an ideal.

But even though CSS is still in a fairly adumbral state in the real world, it's still reasonably enough supported when it's a matter of simple things like colours and fonts. The point being that your templates shouldn't (ideally) have to all deal with both skin customisations and slots for dynamic content.

Heh, if you're feeling adventurous, you could design an XML definition and write your templates in XML; then have a selection of XSLT transformations that will turn it into HTML/CSS in various ways (filling in the content as it goes).

Cagez

I want the users that use my script to be able to change the layout also (as in table layout), as well as the color scheme (which I decieded early that it would be best to make it CSS driven). So is it still best just to use str_replace in the user-defined templates to get the required data in the right spot? I was thinking about using Smarty templates, but had a look and decided otherwise 😃

I suppose the str_replaces's shouldn't be parsed at "viewing time" but at "install" time right? to save loading time?

Thanks you all for your replies too, they're really helping.🙂

feldon23

I want the users that use my script to be able to change the layout also (as in table layout), as well as the color scheme (which I decieded early that it would be best to make it CSS driven). So is it still best just to use str_replace in the user-defined templates to get the required data in the right spot? I was thinking about using Smarty templates, but had a look and decided otherwise

I'm a firm believer in creating (if you have the time and patience) a complete administration interface for the users which provides them with a form to change each and every element of the pages I have chosen for them to have access to. This could include a whole box just for the CSS file that would be included in each page with boxes to pick colors, control the style of each font, etc. I really think you can give full control without teaching your users HTML.

Certainly you can use str_replace as others have suggested. I'm more of an "include" or "fetch from MySQL" designer.

Weedpacket

Originally posted by Cagez
I suppose the str_replaces's shouldn't be parsed at "viewing time" but at "install" time right? to save loading time?

Display will be faster, but there are a couple of drawbacks you'll have to take note of:
(1) You will need to store the complete "prestyled" templates each user has chosen so that you don't have to regenerate them
(2) You will still need to store the individual settings themselves, so that the user can alter them later, and generate a new batch of templates for themselves.