monotek/minitpl

This package is abandoned and no longer maintained. The author suggests using the titpetric/minitpl package instead.

Miniature fully featured PHP template engine

v1.3.0 2026-08-24 12:43 UTC

Requires

• php: >=5.6.0

CC-BY-SA-3.0

• Tit Petric

• php
• template
• smarty
• tiny
• small
• minitpl

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-08-24 12:44 UTC

README

The goal of the MiniTPL template engine is to provide a miniature framework which allows you to rapidly create and consume Smarty-like templates without adding the overhead of Smarty to your choice of a PHP framework.

In benchmarks the speed of Mini TPL is very close to PHP itself. All that is usually needed for Mini TPL is a 3KB PHP code overhead. So it beats Smarty, and usual PHP vsprintf and str_replace functionality.

With a total size of about 13KB and the functionality contained, this is one of the smallest full featured template engines for PHP to date.

MiniTPL is available on packagist as titpetric/minitpl.

To start using MiniTPL in your project with composer, create a composer.json file:

{
    "require": {
        "titpetric/minitpl": ">=1.0"
    }
}

And run composer install. You can start using MiniTPL right away.

<?php

include("vendor/autoload.php");

$tpl = new MiniTPL\Template;

$tpl->load("test.tpl");
$tpl->render();

The classes live in the MiniTPL namespace: MiniTPL\Template, MiniTPL\Compiler and MiniTPL\Hook. Compiler and Hook are usable stand-alone; Template is the entrypoint you normally want.

Escaping

Printed variables are escaped by default. The compiler scans the template to see where a variable lands, so {title} is escaped in a text node, in an attribute value and in a comment, and left alone inside a <script> or <style> body where html escaping would corrupt the code:

<a href="{news.link}" title="{news.title}">{news.title}</a>

A value that is already markup opts out per tag with {content|raw}, or its {content|unescape} alias. A whole template opts out with the {*noescape*} directive, and a whole Template instance with $tpl->set_escape(false).

This changes compiled output, so a cache written by an earlier version has to be cleared once on upgrade. See docs/minitpl-usage.md for the full rules.

phpscript

The engine is kept compatible with phpscript, a PHP interpreter written in Go. phpscript resolves composer.json and the vendor/ directory on its own, so the same vendor/autoload.php include works there:

phpscript example.php

Testing

The project tries to maintain 100% code coverage. You can verify this by running phpunit --coverage-text, or uncommenting the logging section within phpunit.xml.