mason's Introduction

Mason Templates

Need templates in your PHP project fast, but don't want to deal with the overhead of a big template library? Well fear not! Mason Templates are a lightweight solution inspired by the famous PHP Template Language which has been used by PHP developers the world over since the very first release of PHP. Mason templates make it easy to separate the concerns of your view code from your application logic, all while maintaining the expressive power of PHP itself.

Examples

Basic Operation

It's easy to get started with Mason Templates, here is a minimal example:

include("path/to/your/lib/dir/Mason.php");
use mason\Mason as Mason;

/* Tell flash where to find our templates */
$flash = new Mason("path/to/your/template/directory");

/* Subdirectories are okay here too! */
echo $flash->render("favs.tpl");

To plug your variables into a template simply change the last line in the previous example to:

echo $flash->render("favs.tpl", array("name"      => "Maria",
                                      "favorites" => array("Raindrops on roses",
                                                           "Whiskers on Kittens",
                                                           "Bright copper kettles",
                                                           ...),
                                      ));

And in your template:

<h1>A few of my favorite things</h1>
<p>Hi, my name is <?=$name?>, and here are a few of my favorite things.</p>

<ul>
    <?php foreach($favorites as $item): ?>
    <li><?=$item?></li>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
</ul>

Template Inheritance

Mason also supports (single) template inheritance. See the examples directory for a full example.

index.tpl
...
<title>
    <?php $block("title");?>
        Default Title
    <?php $end();?>
</title>
...
<body>
    <?php $block("content");?>
        Default Content.
    <?php $end();?>
</body>
...

And in your derived template:

derived_and_contrived.tpl
...
<!-- Assignment makes it obvious that you can only extend one template per file. -->
<?php $extend = "index.tpl";?>

<?php $block("title");?>
Derived and contrived
<?php $end();?>

<?php $block("content");?>
New content for derived_and_contrived.tpl.
<?php $end();?>

Why

Read the above link! No, but seriously many people forget that PHP started out as a template language and get wrapped up in trying to write a complex meta-language, when all they really need is to echo some variables into a page. Mason Templates are the minimal amount of wrapper code to take an array of values and dump them into a template file. Mason Templates save you from having to write the (albeit small) amount of boilerplate required to use PHP as your template engine. If you're starting a project from scratch, or considering replacing your template engine why not give Mason Templates a try?

mason's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

mason's Issues

Add a way to inject methods

Need to be able to dynamically add methods.

See: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/custom-template-tags/

Before and After functions

Sometimes you want to append or prepend something to the parent's content instead of replacing it outright. This is not currently possible with append/prepend because they work only in the parent template. To that end we should add before and after functions that work outside of the normal blocks and are only concatenated after the block is full processed.

For example:

===File A===

Default

===File B===

<?php $after('content')?>
<div>After</div>
<?php $end('content')?>

===File C===

<?php $before('content')?>
<div>Before</div>
 <?php $end('content")?>

<?php $block('content')?>
<div>Override</div>
<?php $end('content')?>

Would produce:

Before

Override

After

Mason should catch PHP warnings/errors

Mason should use set_error_handler to return a list of errors from render instead of rendering them into the source of the page.

Throwing Exceptions makes render unsuitable for use in __toString

When mason cannot find a requested template file it throws an exception. Unfortunately if this happens inside a __toString method this causes a fatal error which cannot be caught and provides little information as to why the application died.

Possible solutions:

Have an error reporting level (EXCEPTION|WARN|IGNORE|LOG) for development, testing, and production.
Detect if a __toString method is anywhere on the callstack and use trigger_error instead (not a fan of this one).
Just always print a warning (is problematic in a production setting when errors should not appear to the user)

Recommend Projects

dwest / mason Goto Github PK

mason's Introduction

Mason Templates

Examples

Basic Operation

Template Inheritance

Why

mason's People

Contributors

Stargazers

Watchers

mason's Issues

Add a way to inject methods

Before and After functions

Mason should catch PHP warnings/errors

Throwing Exceptions makes render unsuitable for use in __toString

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