VlibTemplate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
vlibTemplate is a template engine written in PHP. Programmers and web developers may use it for web development. 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} and so on.
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 separate 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 separate all of the design from the data, which you create using PHP.
vlibTemplate is a part of vLIB. It has an interface to vlibDate and vlibMimeMail. You can program powerful web applications with vLIB.
[edit] Code example
Since vlibTemplate separates PHP from HTML, you have two files:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>{tmpl_var name='title_text'}</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>
<p>{tmpl_var name='body_text'}</p>
</body>
</html>
Note that this file contains plain HTML and one markup tag. TMPL_VAR is used to display template variables, which are assigned in the PHP script:
require_once 'vlib/vlibTemplate.php';
$tmpl = new vlibTemplate('tmpl/basic.htm');
$tmpl->setvar ('title_text', 'TITLE: This is the vLIB basic example ...');
$tmpl->setvar ('body_text', 'BODY: This is the message set using setvar()');
$tmpl->pparse();
Even complicated designs can be programmed with vlibTemplate. You can use vlibTemplateCache to speed up the parsing process.
[edit] Features
- WYSIWYG: you can design and edit your templates with Frontpage, Dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG HTML editor you can think of.
- Structure and Modularity: vlibTemplate will help you a great deal about modularity and structure of your code. It will help you to create cleaner code, too.
- Template includes: you can include a template file from within another template file so, for example, you can have a site footer that you point to from each template, if you needed to change the footer, it can be done simply by editing 1 file.
- Template loops: you can set up loops in your template for maybe showing the result of a database query. You can use setdbloop and let handle vlibTemplate the $result (e.g. returned by mysql_query, pg_query or ora_do). vlibTemplate can handle a lot of RDBMS like: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Informix and others.
- Template conditions: you can actually use boolean conditions in your template (<tmpl_if name="is_true"></tmpl_if>), this can be handy for displaying different color in a table, or showing a list of results in a search page.
- Template caching: you can cache your templates to a file which means that vlibTemplate reads the template from the cache (which is already compiled) and thus can save much time while writing a page.
- Template debugging: if you want to see exactly what's being used by vTemplae you can see by using vlibTemplateDebug. This class will output an HTML-formatted page with all data needed to see where you're going wrong. It will even tell you if there are errors in the way you've written the template.
