Re: Using PHP/HTML effectivly

Thankyou everyone who responded to my original message. All of your ideas have showed me the various ways of doing it, however I believe that the idea from Jons message is best suited to my needs. I realise the logic behind it, its put together some knowledge I have already so I think I'll use it for the time being. Thankyou for taking the time to respond to my message. Regards, Alex On 14/6/06 19:48, "Jon Anderson" <jon@gamingsolutions.ca> wrote: > This is my opinion on the matter... > > From experience, I would say that mixing PHP and HTML together in a > complicated page can often get very ugly. I prefer to separate out > presentation and code into separate layers as much as possible. > > I have most often used template systems such as Smarty (smarty.php.net) > for that. I use Smarty for work - I find it quite nice. It allows you to > separate your code from your presentation very effectively. It's easy to > use, and provides things like caching for performance. > > However, I came to the realization recently that PHP itself is > essentially a very feature rich template system (nevermind the fact that > it's a well defined language. ;-) > > By splitting up my most recent project into includes, templates, and > pages, I get a solution to the problem in pure PHP. In the end, code > looks like code, and HTML looks (almost) like HTML and both are > readable. (Same result as what Smarty gives you, without needing Smarty.) > > Most pages look something like: > > <?php > include('include/data_functions.php'); > if ($condition) { > $title = 'Here is Some Data!'; > $data = getSomeData($var1,$var2); > } else { > $title = 'Here is the Other Data!'; > $data = getOtherData($var1,$var2); > } > include('template/page.php'); > ?> > > And most templates look something like: > > <?php include('template/head.php'); ?> > <h1><?= $title ?></h1> > ... > <table> > <?php foreach ($data as $item) { ?> > <tr> > <td><?= $item['part1'] ?></td> > <td><?= $item['part2'] ?></td> > </tr> > <?php } /* END foreach ($data as $item) */ ?> > </table> > ... > <p>Thanks for your interest in my data!</p> > <?php include('template/foot.php'); ?> > > jon