Template System ideas?

FatalError

Alright, so basically I'm currently writing a forum system in PHP (see my signature), and I'm having a little trouble deciding on a template format for styles/themes. If you look at other forums, phpBB has its own template engine, myBB and MyTopix just store HTML in the database, SMF and IPB use plain PHP files (ew...), etc etc.

For my forum system I need a easy-to-use template system to edit styles and themes. Basically my question is what kind of system should I implement? What do you think would be the easiest and most efficient way to edit a forum's theme? Note that I'm not just talking about the style here, I'm talking about the layout and everything. HTML, CSS, images, everything. I need a quick and easy way to edit these that is easy to store as well.

Here were my ideas so far...

Make a custom XML-based template engine where the templates would be stored in files. The implementation would be almost identical to phpBB, the only major difference being a different template engine (XML vs HTML + comments). The big downside to this is that the files will need to be edited by hand, which is not exactly what I was going for...on the other hand, themes will be very easy to install with this method.
Create a rich, visual drag-and-drop editor for editing the layout, and a CSS editor for the styles. This would be the best method...if it was that simple. It would be slightly limited for advanced users: they wouldn't be able to edit the HTML directly. Also, I'd have to figure out how to store the info (most likely database, with an export option to download it as XML or something). This is the most likely option at this point.
Have a theme editor similar to the one in InvisionFree (for those that have used it). It would have a CSS editor and an HTML editor for each "section" of the forums (header, body, footer, etc). This is probably the worst method out of the three simply because it is very limited: HTML is limited to only those sections, you can't add your own modules, etc.

Sorry if this seems unclear or complicated, I'll clear up any questions if necessary.
Any ideas/comments/suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance!

Protato

Have you looked at using Smarty Templates?
http://smarty.php.net/

It completely separates the php from the presentation. The first time I looked into smarty it seemed too difficult to implement. Now that I'm working on public projects (rather then intranet) and am forced to use Smarty, I absolutely love it; and not just because I get to pass a ton of work to the designer.

I have a basic FAQ where the php file builds all the information, then assigns it to smarty vars, which are displayed by a tpl file. If you would like to take a look at it send me a PM. For me I had to visually see smarty in action to realize its potential.

FatalError

I'm not using Smarty for a couple reasons:

I am writing an independant forum application, and I want all the code written to be solely my own.
It's slow as hell, and one of the main traits of my forum is speed.
I personally don't really like working with it...

dougal85

If your planning to write in all yourself your on for a mission and a half. Why not take ideas from smarty and phpbb etc. just take what you like.

Protato

FatalError wrote:
I'm not using Smarty for a couple reasons:

I am writing an independant forum application, and I want all the code written to be solely my own.

It's slow as hell, and one of the main traits of my forum is speed.

I personally don't really like working with it...

Fair enough.

I agree with dougal though, take what you like from both. The basic template system I built grabs the html file with file_get_contents(), then I ran some substr_replace to find my place holder variables and replace them with values. I really couldn't think of a better way of doing it, so I'd be interested in hearing what you decide to go with.

mikeschroeder

My suggestion is XML/XSLT

This of course only if you are planning on php5 support and you may need to enable or compile xsl support.

It's been around for the better part of a decade. It provides tons of feauters and supports Xpath and Xquery to locate and compare nodes and data. It also allows for conditions, looping, and don't forget it allows and unlimited number of subtemplate inclusion.

If you set it up so your php code writes pure XML output and then you load that into the DOM as well as loading the XSL template file and do the transformation with php you will end up with html code.

XSL provides very good logic/presentation seperation. Its very intelligent to look at and figure out whats being done and it validates. I have also seen Dreamweaver CS3 do live transformations so a designer could connect xml and make what they are looking at true to life.

Take a look at http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.xsl.php for more info. -and/or- http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/ for xsl language constructs.

It LOOKS like it is overwhelming but it is very simple and easy to adapt. It doesn't rewrite the php langauge and it is very fast. I have been using it for the past 6 months to develop a custom enterprise CMS system. If you PM me I will be glad to show you some examples from my current sandbox site which uses xml/xslt to build dynamic forms, pages, etc.

Mike

Horizon88

When I built an engine for posting articles and such on an old site of mine, the way I set up my templating engine was using includes() to a single template file.
templates/themename/theme.php
would be the XHTML and CSS file with $title, $content, vars in it, then, say, index.php, would set the page name and set $content equal to whatever source the content needed to come from - hardcoded (like for the index page) or a database query. Worked fine for me.