Similar Templating

Dave Shea’s approach to building up pages is a lot like my “Tesco Value” templating system used for small sites, although I tend to opt for functions rather than multiple includes to improve security and performance (several commenters made similar suggestions).

For example, a simple page might use a bit of PHP:

<?
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/somewhere/something.php');

$section = 'services';   //site section the page is in
$title = 'Example Page'; //main bit of page title
$style = 'subpage';      //class to add to body tag

//metadata
$description = 'An amazing example page.';
$keywords = 'template,php,hacky';

pageStart();
?>

<p>Page content</p>

<?
pageEnd();
?>

The functions use the global variables to build up the layout, highlight the current section in the navigation, etc., with a few simple if statements. For larger sites you need to look at things like XSLT and Smarty, but don’t feel compelled to overcomplicate.

Wed 15th Jun 2005, 8:55pm GMT

Filed under: Hints and Tips, Server-side Coding, Web

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