What and how is this being done?

jrcarr

I don't consider myself new to PHP, Html, JavaScript, Asp, ASP.NET.... but I have run into something I haven't seen before, so maybe I'm a little slow.

I was looking at some code that I download quite some time back, to get some new ideas or methods to possibly work with. This code was doing something I haven't seen before. 90% of the pages are .php pages doing pretty much normal stuff. Most of it I am able to figure out what is going on with little to no problem. It is stuff in the .html pages that has thrown me a curve. Throughout most of the .html pages, I'm find things like {{title}},{{template}}, {{callmod search}}, which are retrieving values from variable created in the .php files or running a function within a .php file. What is this called and just how is it being done? I've always just done something like:

<?echo $title; ?>
Or
<? include("headers.php"); ?>

Could some take a minute to tell me what this is and if it is more common that I have seen.

Thanks

Jack

bradgrafelman

jrcarr wrote:
What is this called and just how is it being done?

The common term is probably "templating", or separating the HTML code out into separate files with placeholders for PHP code/variables/etc.

A template engine (Smarty, for example) would then load the file, scan for the different types of replacements, do the necessary logic/replacement, and then output the resulting HTML.

jrcarr

So, is there an advantage to doing "templating"? From what I've read, Smarty and others seem to cause additional overhead. I don't see it in a lot of the Open Source downloads I look though. Just curious why this open source used it and most of the others I've used or looked at don't.

Thanks again

Jack