PatTemplate is a template system that gives us the power and flexibility to add templates to our PHP driven sites. In this article Havard gives us details and examples of how to use patTemplate with PHP.
Simple PHP Templates With PatTemplate - An Overview Of PatTemplate (Page 2 of 6 )
The first thing I noticed about patTemplate was it's ease of use. When you make your templates, you divide your document into different parts by using XML-tags. Here is an example of a template:
When patTemplate parses this file, it looks for variables and replaces them with their associated values. In this case {HEADLINE} and {CONTENT} are the variables. We will see how we can assign values to these placeholder variable on the next page. Right now we will see how easy designing a template can be.
Here's some of the key-features of patTemplate (taken directly from the patTemplate site):
Use special XML tags to separate a document into templates
Use an infinite amount of templates in one page
Read from several plain html files
Local and/or global variables
Automatic repetition of templates to build lists
Automatically create alternating lists by using OddEven templates
Automatically enumerate entries in list
Templates can have child templates
Subtemplates to do simple if(); elseif(); else(); statements
Strip or replace unused variables from HTML
Hide/Show templates in a document
Read external files with/without parsing them
Strip leading/trailing whitespace in lines for smaller HTML code
Use a template several times in a document by linking to it
Quote template tags to use them in a second parsing process (enables you to build templates from templates)
Output any ASCII format you like (HTML, txt, XML, LaTex, etc)
A basic example Let's take another look at the example we saw earlier. It's pretty basic, but I'll explain every part of it:
Let me explain the different parts of this example.
<patTemplate:tmpl name="table">
This is a special patTemplate tag that defines a template. The attribute "name" sets the name of the template, which by the way has to be unique as the patTemplate makes calls to different templates using their unique names.
{HEADLINE}
This is a variable. Variables works as placeholders for the actual content. I should probably mention that variables can only contain uppercase characters, numbers and the underscore (_). They are always enclosed in curly braces.
</patTemplate:tmpl>
This is yet another patTemplate tag which marks the end of a template. If you're used to XML then should be pretty self-explanatory.
In the next section we'll see how we can replace the placeholders with actual content. Before we continue, save the example above as "example1.tmpl.html".
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