Templates - what are they?

[stovellp]

I've heard about them quite a bit on these forums, but not much anywhere else. What are 'templates' and how do they work? Does anyone have any links where I could learn more?

~ Paul

[laserlight]

Maybe some documentation on Smarty will help:
http://smarty.php.net/manual/en/preface.php

[Arc]

a Template is used when you have multiple pages with the same layout. This way when you want to change one thing on the site you dont have to change it on 100 pages.. you just change the template and all the pages change with it.

[superwormy]

Originally posted by Arc
a Template is used when you have multiple pages with the same layout. This way when you want to change one thing on the site you dont have to change it on 100 pages.. you just change the template and all the pages change with it.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=template

Dictionary.com :-)

Seriously though, its exactly what it sounds like. Say you are going to display 20 products on a website. Why do the HTML for all 20 when you can do it once, adn just apply that template to all 20 products?

[valshooter]

Do you people use templates only when you have more than 1 page to display with the same layout?

It can be done without template - just with simple php script no need to use template. Just echo, echo and echo...

It seemes to me question was asked about: what is template like Smarty, PEAR/IT, etc.

Template - is html (? lol not maybe xml or txt for email templates) data with some special tags inside it parsed by special script called Template Engine.

For example:

<title>{$username}</title>
Welcome back, {$username}

We need this piece of html only once but i insist on using templates here too.

The main value everyone (programmer, designer/coder, site owner/webmaster) gains from templates is complete independence of php coding, html layout and data stored in database (Lol)

What templates are and how they are parsed depends on certain template engine. Personally i'm using some version of Smarty that is super: speed and flexibility are incredible.

I've tried PEAR/IT. It sucks. It's hard to work with and it sucks.

I didn't understand why we need to use templates - as we can create top.inc.php and bot.inc.php and go-go-go!

But templates are necessary as long as your site/project is going to live and develop.

Sorry for so many words.