Php templating with codeigniter

codeigniterPHPtemplates

I am currently develop a website application in codeigniter, and I'd like to do something in PHP / CodeIgniter where I can make a common template for separate sections of the website. I was thinking that I would keep the header / footer in a separate php files & include them separately.

The thing I'm not sure about is the content beneath the header and above the footer. This website application will contain a lot of different pages, so I'm having a hard time figuring how what's the best way to do this.

Best Answer

I generally prefer to create a "layout" file rather than having to include both a header and footer on every page. It's more flexible.

Here's a snippet from one of my projects:

ob_start();
include '../views/'.$templateFile;
$pageContent = ob_get_clean();
include '../views/layouts/'.$layoutFile;

All you have to do is enable output buffering, include the template, then call ob_get_clean() to nab the contents of your template and put it into a variable. Once it's in a variable you can include your main layout file, which should echo $pageLayout somewhere inside.

e.g.,

<html>
<head>
    <title>Your Site</title>
</head>
<body>
    <!-- header here -->
    <?= $pageContents ?>
    <!-- footer here -->
</body>
</html>

That said, surely Code Igniter has some kind of templating built in, no? I'm not familiar with it. Edit: Apparently it does not. Kind of silly really; with caching, the performance cost of a nice templating engine is negligible.

Related Solutions

Php – Translating longer texts (view and email templates) with gettext

I stumbled upon a similar problem not long ago (see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8288050/can-i-automatically-update-msgids-in-gettexts-po-files-for-trivial-text-change ).

Basically, there are two options:

Do it the way gettext is meant to be used: Use the original texts as msgid, HTML and all. Then every change to the original text will invalidate all translations. msgmerge's fuzzy matching will, however, usually still match the right original text to the old translation, so usually the old translation will be available to the translator.
Insted of using the original text as msgid, use some synthetic identifier (like EMAIL_TEMPLATE_NEWSLETTER_START). That way, the IDs never change. The original (probably English) texts will then simply be another translation to gettext. Main disadvantages: 1) You must track separately which translations are up to date; 2) Some gettext tools may not handle this well (translators may need special tools).

PHP – Creating a Custom PHP Template Engine

I'm not sure if I've understood your problem correctly or not, but that seems to me that Loading the data is your problem, not anything else related to your template engine, right?

If yes, my questions is, where are the other contents of your application? I mean where is the page content? Put the meta tags, titles, etc. just where you have the other data.

If you're storing your page content in the database, then add these meta tags (whatever) to your database, load them when you loading the page content and then just pass them to your template engine.

If you have static pages, then add something like these to each page, and later you can grab it and pass it to your template engine:

<?php
/* Sample.php */
$title = 'Sample Page';
$meta = 'whatever';
?>
<!-- Page Content -->
<h3>Welcome!</h3>
...

P.S. BTW, such an array of titles and meta tags is not an issue for a real-world web server.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – Translating longer texts (view and email templates) with gettext

PHP – Creating a Custom PHP Template Engine

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