README

A light weight helper for simple php templating.

Why use Tower?

If you want to keep your view logic separated from the core code, Tower is for you. Tower is obviously not a full-fledged template engine. Although if you are using a PHP framework like Codeigniter, Laravel etc., Tower is again a bad solution.

Tower is best suited if for small scale web applications, where you may not need a full-fledged framework. If you decide to write a web application using plain PHP, then do check Tower.

Installing Tower

Tower is available via composer. Add the following line to your composer.json so that Tower is autoloaded into your application.

"require": {
  "swaroopsm/tower": "0.3"
}

Using Tower

Tower has a very simple and easy API consisting of a few methods.

Instantiate Tower

$tower = new Tower();

Set a template file

Tell Tower which file should be used as the template.

// filename: template.php
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <title></title>
</head>
<body>
  <h2><?= $name ?></h2>
  <p><?= $description ?></p>
</body>
</html>

$tower->setTemplate('template.php');

Set variables

Tower lets you setup variables that can be used in your template.

$tower->set('name', 'Tower');
$tower->set('description', 'A simple template helper');

Render your template

Render on your browser.

$tower->render();

Template Layouting

Tower also lets you add a layout for your templates. This can be useful if for your webpages. Example on using layout in your templates;

$tower->setLayout('layout.php');

You use the $yield to render the template contents in your helper. A more detailed example on using layout is availabe at: Layout Example

Using Partials

Partials allows you to include templates in other templates thus allowing you to re-use the templates. Refer to the following code in order to set partials for your templates.

$tower->partial->set('header', 'header.php');
$tower->partial->set('footer', 'footer.php');

And to render these partials in your templates use:

<?= $partial['header'] ?>

Some stuffs here...

<?= $partial['footer'] ?>

If you decide to use a different variable for the partial instead of $partial use the following:

$tower->partial->setPrefix('towerPartial');

Now you can do the following:

<?= $towerPartial['header'] ?>

Some stuffs here...

<?= $towerPartial['footer'] ?>

Refer here for a Detailed Example

Some Goodies

Few other extra methods included in Tower.

Save to file

This is useful if you would like to dynamically save contents to a file.

$tower->save('filename.txt');

swaroopsm / tower

Maintainers

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