Is it best practice using __get/__set and extract for a template engine

[cigcode]

Hi guys,

I am a bit worried about my simple template script. I know that using extract can be dangerous.. but since I am not receiving any users  input

I decided to go along with using it in this case. What I want to know is, am I using get/set () correctly here? I mean is it worth using it this way?
I really don't want to release scripts if there is bad coding practice all over. The reason why I am doing it this way is because I like the idea of just having to set something and just calling its $name on a script.

	if (!class_exists ("template"))
	{
		class template
		{
			protected $templateDir;
			protected $templateFile; 
			protected $templateVars  = array ();

		public function __construct ($dir)
		{
			if (!is_dir ($dir)) 
			{
				 throw new Exception ("$dir no such file or directory", 1);
		    }
			$this->templateDir = $dir;
		}

		public function stgRenderTemplate ($file)
		{
			if (!is_readable ($this->templateDir.$file))
		   	{
		   		throw new Exception ("$this->templateDir.$file File is not readable", 1);	
		   	}

		   	$this->templateFile = $file;
		}

		public function stgOutputTplView ()
		{
			 $bufferData = "";

			ob_start ();

			 if (!empty ($this->templateVars))
		 	 {  
			 	 extract ($this->templateVars);
			 }

			 include $this->templateDir.$this->templateFile;
			 $bufferData = ob_get_clean ();

			 return  $bufferData;
		}

		public function __get ($p)
		{
			 if (array_key_exists ($p, $this->templateVars))
			 {
			 	 return $this->templateVars [$p];
			 }
		}

		public function __set ($p, $v)
		{
			 $this->templateVars [$p] = $v;
		}
	}
}

I just really want to know if this is good and that maybe I should stop worrying. This is being coded for a wp plugin.

[NogDog]

I generally avoid it these days simply because many (most? all?) code editors will not be able to recognize that something like $someObject->protectedParameter is something the object can actually return or set (and thus can not give you any tool-tip hints and such). I'll use it sometimes when first developing a class just to make it easy to work with initially, but eventually remove the get() and/or set() and put in specific getter/setter methods where needed.

[Weedpacket]

I don't know anything about whether there's a "best practice" or not, but I note that Zend Framework does this in its view model. It would probably be a good idea to provide methods like [man]__isset[/man] as well.

[cigcode]

Thanks guys!!, that clears things up a bit, I would really hate to release a plugin with codes that seem to be great at the time and all of a sudden people
state that a certain function is bad, although I feel that a function is only as bad as how the user's knowledge in it. Also as for the __isset () method, I
will go look in to this. I have seen this before but never got around to try it.

Thanks again.