Modular PHP Development with FastTemplate

by Daniel Solin
10/02/2003

I don't know about you, but all these documents about dividing web programming into logic, presentation, and content always irritate me. Most of them miss an important point: often at least three people develop a web page--the programmer (i.e, the PHP or Perl guru), the web designer who provides the presentation (the HTML designer), and the content developer (perhaps a marketing person). If you're working for a multilingual company, you probably have to make the pages available in several different languages as well, with one marketing person responsible for each language. Most documentation on this subject tends to forget, or at least doesn't bother to notice, either the web designer or the marketing person.

I bring up this subject because, as the programmer, I'm usually the one who has to come up with a solution. The marketing people simply don't understand the problem. While the web designer probably understands, he or she may not know how to solve it. When I point out this issue at a project meeting, everybody looks at me with the "you're the genius here, so come up with something brilliant!" look. Genius or not, they're right.

This article will demonstrate how to divide logic from presentation and presentation from content. In the end, a web page will consist of three files: one PHP file with all page logic, one HTML file containing the presentation, and one or more language files that will hold the texts for the page. The language file to use for a specific request will be determined on-the-fly by examining the current site. (www.mysite.com/index.php will present information in English, www.mysite.se/index.php in Swedish, and www.mysite.de/index.php in German.)

Choosing a Template Engine

To separate logic, presentation, and text into different files, we need a template engine. Most PHP projects today use Smarty for this, but we won't. Smarty puts too much logic into the template itself. To avoid confusing or upsetting the web designer, the core template must look as much like a regular HTML page as possible. That means no strange looking iteration code and such. Instead, we'll use FastTemplate. FastTemplate may not be as advanced and featureful as Smarty, but its syntax is definitely better suited for this problem.

Let's look at a concrete example of what differentiates FastTemplate and Smarty. Suppose we want to iterate through a set of database records, presenting a list of products to sell online. With Smarty, this would be a very simple task; we would just add something like the code below to the template HTML file:

{section name=products loop=$ProductName}

{$smarty.section.products.iteration}
{$ProductName[products]}
{$ProductPrice[products]}<br />
 
{/section}

What's the big deal about this? It looks quite smooth. However, when the web designer opens the HTML document containing this code in Frontpage or Dreamweaver, what do you think the reaction is? "What the heck is this?! Remove, remove, remove..." However, if we put this logic into the PHP file instead, like FastTemplate does, the web designer never has to see this logic, and the chance of getting a valid template file back increases. With FastTemplate, you register the iteration in the PHP file, but only mark it with a standard HTML comment in the template:

<!-- 
BEGIN DYNAMIC BLOCK: products -->
<tr>
<td>{ProductName}</td>
<td>{ProductPrice}</td>
</tr>
<!-- 
END DYNAMIC BLOCK: products -->

FastTemplate uses the two comments to identify the dynamic block, and then parses it according to the logic in the PHP file. This setup is cleaner, as it doesn't mix up the logic with the presentation. Also, the web designer won't need to bother about the logic at all but can just open then template in any program, make the necessary changes, and then upload it to the server (as long as the comments stay intact, that is). Let's see how this would work in reality.

Defining the Framework

To make it easier to create many web pages using this technique, we'll start by defining a framework to include into other PHP files. This framework consists of two files.

• header.php will be included at the top of every PHP file. It makes sure FastTemplate is initiated correctly. Then, by using a couple of variables in the $_SERVER array, it includes the correct template file and language file, and initiates FastTemplate to use these files.
• footer.php tells FastTemplate to parse the template and language file into a human-readable result. It then prints this result to the browser.

To use this framework, each PHP file will include header.php at the top and footer.php at the end. Any logic for the web page goes in between.

header.php is:

1:  <?
2:     include_once ( "./FastTemplate/class.FastTemplate.php4" );
3:     $php_self_us = eregi_replace ( "\.", "_", $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] );
4:     $tld = strrchr ( $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'], "." );
5:     $tld = substr ( $tld, 1 );
6:     include_once ( $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$php_self_us."_" .$tld.".lang");
7:     $tpl = new FastTemplate ( $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] ); 
8:     $tpl->assign( $text ); 
9:     $tpl->define( array( page => $php_self_us.".html" ) );
10: ?>

On line 2, we include the FastTemplate class, making it available for use. Line 3 puts the name of this PHP file, with all dots replaced by an underscore, in the variable $php_self_us. So, if the name of your PHP script that has included header.php is index.php, $php_self_us will contain index_php. This variable is used on line 6 and line 9 to include the correct language and template files.

In lines 4 and 5 we parse out the TLD (top level domain) for the current server. Line 4 copies the last dot and everything after it from $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] to the variable $tld. If your server name is http://www.myserver.com/, the value of $tld will be .com. Line 5 then uses substr() to remove the leading dot of $tld.

Line 6 includes the correct language file for this request. If your document root is /usr/local/apache/htdocs, the name of the PHP script is index.php; and if the server name is http://www.myserver.com/, then the complete path to and name of the file included here will be /usr/local/apache/htdocs/index_php_com.lang. This file should define all text for the .com version (probably in English) of your site in an array called $text. We'll examine that more closely a little later.

Next, on line 7, we create a new FastTemplate object, using the document root as the location of all template files. Line 8 assigns the texts defned in the language to the FastTemplate object. In practice, this means FastTemplate will be able to replace all text constants in the template file with the real text. On line 9, we tell FastTemplate which template file to use. If the PHP were named index.php, this call would search for a template file called index_php.html.

footer.php is very simple. It ensures that the FastTemplate instance was created correctly, parses the template defined in the last line of header.php, then prints the result to the browser:

1: <?
2:    if( isset($tpl))
3:    { 
4:        $tpl->parse( PAGE, page );
5:        $tpl-> FastPrint( PAGE);
6:    } 
7: ?>

Note that we don't call print() or echo() manually. The FastTemplate->FastPrint() function takes care of it.

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