As with the code I’ve released previously, I have found myself cutting and pasting this code about the place again and again, so I’ve packaged up my simple PHP template framework and stuck it on github.

This library comes complete with a basic HTML5, JSON, and JSONP templates, that you can extend and override, making the development of web applications (hopefully) slightly easier. It does for me at any rate, because I really hate repeating myself!

Usage

The default template engine provided by this library – the Basic template – should be fairly familiar to anyone who’s used Elgg or similar systems.

You initialise it with a set of template base paths (“base” provides a basic HTML5 hierachy). If you pass an array to the constructor, each array overrides the one preceding it, and so you can replace some functionality (for example providing a bootstrap layout) without having to replace everything.

Views are in a file hierarchy off of [basepath]/[template_type]/path/to/view.php, and are named simply as the path without the base gumph (in the example I give in the docs, this view would be ‘path/to/view’).

HTML5 versions of pages are in the /default/ template type branch, but the basic template comes with json and jsonp encoding of the pages, you can specify which template to use at runtime by passing the _vt=[branch] variable on the GET line, or from within your program code.

The basic template also makes a call to the simple event dispatcher before and after a given view is generated, passing “view:[viewname with colons instead of slashes]” as the namespace and either “prepend” or “extend” as the event, together with an array of all the variables passed to the view.

So, to listen to my documented example, you’d listen for events on “view:path:to:view” and either “prepend” or “extend”, echoing any extra stuff you want.

Anyway, hopefully this’ll be useful to someone!

» Visit the project on Github...