Chaining smarty templates and clean multiline strings - PHP

Question

I know that the first part of this is subjective, but I'd like to hear some different techniques people use. This is a two part question: what do you use for complex multiline strings in PHP? And, can I use a composition type of relationship with smarty?

Question 1: I know there is heredoc and the "." operator. I'm looking for fresh, more readable ideas if there are any.

Question 2: To be more specific, here is what I would like to do with smarty.

Say I have a template, base.tpl:

<html>
<head><title></title></head>
<body>
{$main_content}
</body>
</html>

Can I chain templates, i.e. another template that represents $main_content, say main.tpl:

<div id="header">$header</div>
<div id="container">
<h1>{$first_header}</h1>
<p>{$first_paragraph}</p>
<h1>{$second_header}</h1>
<p>{$second_paragraph}</p>

I want in whatever.php to load one template into the other, so i.e.:

// ... including smarty and all other boiler plate things ...

$smarty -> assign('first_header', "Foo");
$smarty -> assign('first_paragraph', "This is a paragraph");
$smarty -> assign('second_header', "Bar");
$smarty -> assign('second_paragraph', "This is another paragraph");

$main_content = $smarty->load('main.tpl');
$smarty -> display('base.tpl');

I know that there is "template inheritance" in smarty, but I'm not familiar with it. Can it give me similar functionality to this?

Note: I think my biggest problem with heredoc is that I can't get syntax highlighting for html (if i specify html in the heredoc string). Without the highlighting, the html that I want to pass through smarty is much harder to read, which kind of defeats the purpose of smarty.

You template do not look valid .... seem to be missing `{` and `}` ??? — Baba, Oct 18 '12 at 03:08
Sorry I literally just through together an example and I'm new to smarty. I'll fix it though — grasingerm, Oct 18 '12 at 03:09
Does my answer make sense in terms of including templates within templates? — Matthew Blancarte, Oct 18 '12 at 03:46

Matthew Blancarte · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-18T03:16:08.123

You'll want to use {include} to call templates (fragments) within a template.

http://www.smarty.net/docsv2/en/language.function.include.tpl

<html>
<head>
  <title>{$title}</title>
</head>
<body>
{include file='page_header.tpl'}

{* body of template goes here, the $tpl_name variable
   is replaced with a value eg 'contact.tpl'
*}
{include file="$tpl_name.tpl"}

{include file='page_footer.tpl'}
</body>
</html>

Passing variables into included templates:

{include file='links.tpl' title='Newest links' links=$link_array}
{* body of template goes here *}
{include file='footer.tpl' foo='bar'}

In terms of multi-line strings, I tend to use this pattern:

$my_string = "Wow, this is going to be a long string. How about "
           . "we break this up into multiple lines? "
           . "Maybe add a third line?";

As you said, it's subjective. Whatever you feel comfortable with and as long as its easily readable...

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 18 '12 at 14:02

I found some documentation on template inheritance this morning...

To expand on my example above, you can have a base layout (base.tpl)

<html>
<head><title>{$title|Default="title"}</head>

<body>

<nav>{block name=nav}{/block}</nav>

<div id="main">{block name=main}Main{/block}</div>

<footer>Copyright information blah blah...</footer>

</body>
</html>

You can extend a template and override blocks now with the new version of smarty (home.tpl)

{extends file=base.tpl}

{block name=nav}
          <ul style="list-style:none">
            {foreach $links as $link}
              <li><a href="{$link.href}" target="_blank">{$link.txt}</a></li>
            {/foreach}
          </ul>
{/block}

{block name=main}
    {foreach $paragraphs as $p}
        <h2>{$p.header}</h2>
        <p>{$p.content}</p>
    {/foreach}
{/block}

http://www.smarty.net/inheritance

Chaining smarty templates and clean multiline strings - PHP

2 Answers2