Template System using blocks

ATLien

Hello, I have been using http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/58/1.html to create a template system for my upcoming site. The tutorial is great, I am just trying to expand the functionality to allow for blocks.

Original Class:

<?php
class Page
{
  var $page;

  function Page($template = "template.html") {
    if (file_exists($template))
      $this->page = join("", file($template));
    else
      die("Template file $template not found.");
  }

  function parse($file) {
    ob_start();
    include($file);
    $buffer = ob_get_contents();
    ob_end_clean();
    return $buffer;
  }

  function replace_tags($tags = array()) {
    if (sizeof($tags) > 0)
      foreach ($tags as $tag => $data) {
        $data = (file_exists($data)) ? $this->parse($data) : $data;
        $this->page = eregi_replace("{" . $tag . "}", $data,
                      $this->page);
        }
    else
      die("No tags designated for replacement.");
  }

  function output() {
    echo $this->page;
  }
}
?>

Execution of the class:

<?php
require_once("lib/template.php");

$page = new Page("template.html");

$page->replace_tags(array(
  "title" => "HOME",
  "descript" => "Welcome to my website!",
  "main" => "dat/index.dat",
  "menu" => "dat/menu.dat",
  "left" => "dat/submenu.dat",
  "right" => "dat/right.dat",
  "footer" => "dat/footer.php"
));

$page->output();
?>

What I am trying to accomplish is the ability to use:

Code to display when logged in.

then link that to a if statment in the php so that section will display only if the logged in sessions are registered.

There is some more info and a attempt at doing this here: http://codewalkers.com/forum/index.php?action=displaythread&forum=tutorials&id=174&realm=default

I can't seem to make that work because that deals with loops, I am trying to just use it is a template style if statment.

I appreciate the help. This issue has been something I have worked on for days. The blocks need to be able to work with other types i.e. is_admin stuff like that. There also will be multiple blocks per page. I am not the best at php so anything you can tell me will help.

Here is another thread I asked for help in, and someone answered but I am not evanced enough to understand what they are saying.

konsu

I think i have replied once to a similar posting ; -)

the tutorial that you are using reads html file and replaces all occurences of '{keyword}' by the string represented by the keyword. this is done using regular expressions. there is no functionality to replace any text in between two such occurences. so, you cannot adopt the existing code from the tutorial to do block replacements. you will have to implement your own. what kind of help are you looking for?

ATLien

I am asking how to implement my own. I am not the greatest at php so I am asking someone to help me add what ever functions need to be added to this class to get the result I am asking.

konsu

ok, so for this purpose, i would treat a templated page as xml data. meaning that a template is an xml document of some free form that contains known elements (by "element" i mean xml element, similar to html tag). the goal of template processing is to convert the known elements to html.

for example (using the xml notation, not the one used in the tutorial):

...
<loggedin>
Code to display when logged in.
</loggedin>
...

so, during processing, you would parse the template in to an xml tree, walk the tree and look at the elements, and convert them in to html. this is a general idea.

alternatively, instead of creating a tree, you could just scan the template, look for opening element (<loggedin> in the example) and once this is found, look for the matching closing element (</loggedin>) but this approach is not structured, and you won't be able to effectively process nested blocks.