Best template class

foe

I use fasttemplate, what do you guys use and why?

ednark

templates suck

just do somthing similar to this, all functionality of a template but in raw php

<?php #user.tmpl.php
print <<<END_OF_TEMPLATE

<u>A USER</u><br />
name: "{$name}" <br />
password: '{$password}' <br />

END_OF_TEMPLATE;
?>


<?php
$name = 'ednark';
$password = '1_w1ll_h4x0r_j00';
include 'user.tmpl.php';
?>

you can even do things like put loops in your templates...

only downside to this is that it is php so does not play nice with wysywig editors

but.. look ma... no extra-slow parsing!!!

foe

What happens to the {}

ednark

oh...
inside any php string you can wrap up variables in {}
lets you do things like

{$var['index']}

and

{$var->data['key']->obj_value}

which might otherwise not parse string without the {}

and to specifically answer your question... they just go away

$this_is_a_var = 'foo';
echo "this is a string '{$this_is_a_var}'";
/// this is a string 'foo'

michelb

Using php in your template or trying to create 'templates' as above is really not recommended.

I learned templates using PatTemplate(www.php-tools.de), tutorials are on www.devshed.com about using PatTemplate. Really, really simple stuff..Great to learn from, and a lot faster than FastTemplate and many many others..

Right now I'm using Smarty (http://smarty.php.net/), which is a pretty advanced template system. It has caching and a lot of other really neat stuff. Smarty also has great documentation, which PatTemplate lacks.
It is for as far as I know the fastest and most complete system.

PatTemplate is great for quick learning and Smarty is great for more advanced work. Both can have logic(loops/conditions) in the template without PHP. Both are really, really fast and add little overhead.

Michel Binkhorst

ednark

Using php in your template or trying to create 'templates' as above is really not recommended.

why not recommended?
is it slower? no, its faster, no extra parsing layer
is it more complicated? no, there is no new syntax to memorize
is it less robust? no, its more robust, its as robust as php is, while templating systems offer you only a subset of what php does
is it less secure? no, it uses no evals(), which some template systems offer so there is no security issues

my code does not try to "create 'templates'", php is templates already. the other template systems simple are just complicated code which end up duplicating already existant functionality within php...

there is only one thing these templates do that php does not... allow the template to be viewed and edited within a wysiwyg editor

if you are designing a system for your own use (ie programmers) then there is simply no reason to learn the specific syntax and creation methodology of any of these systems...

if you are designing a templated system for non programers (ie designers) then you want to look into one of the other template engines... since they may have no programming knowledge and you may want to restrict the access of what they can and can't do and perhaps put loops and such in a different syntax more to their liking

proponents of the templates want you to use them, and want you to think that they offer the only solution to a problem and might even tell you that not using their system is 'not recommended'

foe

didnt know about the {} hehe ...

But yeh i am desinging for program to be used by diffrent people (designers) which is why im looking into a template system.

kristianblom

I agree to making your own templates. Just make sure you make them general enough so that you can use them in all you projects...

ednark

i must also add to this argument.....

if you know how to use a template system and you are comfortable with it, then that makes it a better solution than and solution that you don't already know

whatever you are better with and faster at developing with is the correct choice

this is just one of my pet pieves, so i try and make programmers new to templates think about it before being told its the correct solution and jumping right in...

and foe already gave what i believed to be the answer that makes me think a template system is for him/her

does anyone know of a tag based template system...

Zope has ZopePageTemplates which are written in python that im a fan of... and JSP has tag based programming... so is there anything like that for PHP?

foe

I dont know, Its not hard to learn a new template system in 30 min.

feldon23

ednark,

It is all a matter of scale.

Most websites do not need a template system.

But a shopping cart/merchant package like osCommerce or a forum like vBulletin really need it.

vBulletin runs on templates and has a total of 72 PHP files, 2 javascript files, a CSS file, and 1 style/template package file. You can heavily customize it and not fear that upgrading to the next version by replacing the PHP files will lose all your changes.

osCommerce does not run on templates and has a total of 324 PHP files with all the HTML, etc. hard-coded. Basically, once you start modifying it, you are screwed when the next version comes out (which is daily! :eek🙂.

ednark

im not arguing against templating... as you said its essential for a large project...

im simply saying that all programming functionality you would want from a template system does not require you to use some other projects prewrapped string parser...

you can template out exactly as you would with smarty, except not use smarty and stick with php...

functionally they are the same

feldon23

Agreed.

The heredoc notation is great, provided you can prepare all your data before jumping into it.

// prepare all your variables

$data=<<<HEREDOC
<html>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to {$pagename}</h1>
HEREDOC;

echo $data;

If you want to do conditionals/loops, then I guess you could do essentially embedded templates like...

$avatarbits=<<<HEREDOC
<tr><td><img src="{$avatardir}%avatarname%"><br>
<font size=1>%avatarname%</font></td></tr>
HEREDOC;

$data=<<<HEREDOC
<html>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to {$pagename}</h1>
HEREDOC;

reset($avatars);
//conditional loop walking thru $avatars
$data .= str_replace("%avatarname",$avatars['name'], $avatarbits);
//end conditional loop

ednark

thats kinda what i was thinking... i figured you could drop the str_replace though with something like this...

$pagename   = 'foo';
$avatar_dir = '/bar/';

print <<<HEREDOC
<html>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to {$pagename}</h1>
HEREDOC;

reset($avatars);
foreach ( $avatars as $avatarbits ) {
    extract ( $avatarbits, EXTR_PREFIX_ALL, 'avatar_' );
    print <<<HEREDOC
<tr><td><img src="{$avatardir}{$avatar_name}"><br>
<font size="1">{$avatar_name}</font></td></tr>
HEREDOC;
} ### /foreach

feldon23

Well, this is one of those holy wars like PC vs. Mac.

I like having chunks of PHP-less HTML.

It depends on whether other people need to understand my code or not.