Entry
vlibTemplate - How do I separate data (PHP) from design (HTML)?
Sep 8th, 2002 08:10
Claus VB, Kelvin Jones (http://vlib.activefish.com/)
vlibTemplate is a php class that is intended to make splitting PHP from
HTML a simple and natural task.
It makes use of the following vlibTemplate markup tags (like html tags):
<tmpl_var>, <tmpl_loop>, <tmpl_include>, <tmpl_phpinclude>,
<tmpl_comment>, <tmpl_if>, <tmpl_elseif>, <tmpl_else>, <tmpl_unless>,
<tmpl_endloop>, <tmpl_endcomment>, <tmpl_endif> and <tmpl_endunless>.
The file written with these style tags is called a template. A template
can be an HTML file to use on the web, or perhaps a text file to use as
an e-mail template... as you can guess there are many many
possibilities.
The template file is always seperate from the php script that uses it,
that way, a designer for example can change the template file without
having to go through all of the php coding,
thus saving the developer having to worry about it.
Using this class you set the values for the variables, loops, if
statements ..etc which are declared in the template. This enables you
to seperate all of the design from the data, which you create using PHP.
vlibTemplate has three user accessible classes. vlibTemplate,
vlibTemplateDebug and vlibTemplateCache. vlibTemplate is the main class
which handles all of the passing and has the majority of the functions.
vlibTemplateDebug and vlibTemplateCache both extend vlibTemplate and
inherit it's functionality.
You can therefore change the functionality of vlibTemplate just by
appending Debug or Cache.
The debug class requires no parametres to be set, it prints out the
vlibTemplate debug module with debug data for the current page. The
cache class has a few extra functions that are utilisable, the class
saves the parsed file into the filesystem to allow much faster page
accesses and a faster site.
Simple example:
vlibTemplate_basic.php
<?php
include_once('../vlibTemplate.php');
$tmpl = new vlibTemplate('templates/vlibTemplate_basic.html');
$tmpl->setVar('title', 'This is the vlibTemplate Basic example...');
$tmpl->setVar('msg', 'This is the message set using setVar()');
$tmpl->pparse();
?>
vlibTemplate_basic.html
<html>
<head>
<title><tmpl_var name='title'></title>
</head>
<body>
<tmpl_var name='msg'>
</body>
</html>
