Plates – Introduction to PHP Templates
Plates is our template system of choice. It’s a native PHP template system that’s fast and easy to use. Template systems can be used to many purposes, however I will talk about using it to create a simple bilingual website.
What is a template system?
It’s a way to display dynamic data in the same way over multiple pages.
For example, Amazon has untold gazillions of products for sale. Every single one of them has a page. Instead of creating a file for each separate product, they created a template for that page, which is filled with data from some sort of database. If they want to change something on the page, all they need to modify now is one document, rather then a document for each product. Any change would take them years to implement.
Plates
Plates is a native PHP template system. It’s very easy to set up and use. Most servers use PHP by default, so it’s a perfect solution for someone who doesn’t want to or know how to deal with servers.
Installation
All you need to do to is either install it via Composer by typing:
composer require league/plates
or alternatively you can upload these files straight to your projects’ root directory. To download them visit the releases page, select the version you want, and click the “Source code (zip)” download button.
Once that is done, you should see the following folder structure:
../project/
vendor/
composer.json
composer.lock
composer.phar
error.php
error_log
And that’s it.
Simple example
You might have noticed that there are a few things missing. If you put all that on the server, you will get 404 Not Found error.
You need to add a Controller and Templates.
Within your controller (index.php):
<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
// Create new Plates instance
$templates = new League\Plates\Engine('templates/');
// Render a template
echo $templates->render('profile', ['name' => 'Jonathan']);
You also need to create a new folder called templates:
../project/
templates/
template.php
profile.php
vendor/
composer.json
composer.lock
composer.phar
error.php
error_log
index.php
Within your page template (profile.php):
<?php $this->layout('template', ['title' => 'User Profile']) ?>
<h1>User Profile</h1>
<p>Hello, <?=$this->e($name)?></p>The layout template (template.php):
<html>
<head>
<title><?=$this->e($title)?></title>
</head>
<body>
<?=$this->section('content')?>
</body>
</html>Language selection
The easiest way to create a site in two languages in Plates, is to modify the Controller so that it loads the correct text depending on the language selected.
Do to so we can use attributes. In your link to change the language from English to German, just add:
?lang=de
at the end, so that the full link becomes:
<a href="index.php?lang=de">Deutsch</a>
Now, we have to convert the Controller to the following:
<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
// Create new Plates instance
$templates = new League\Plates\Engine('templates/');
$slide = ($_GET["lang"]);
if($slide == 'de') {
// Render a template in german
echo $templates->render('index', [
'title' => 'Deutsch',
]);
}
else {
// Render a template in your default language
echo $templates->render('index', [
'title' => 'English',
]);
}
and that’s it. On the original load the title will be in English, and after changing the language it will be in German.
Escaping
For pure text strings, the following should be used:
<?=$this->e($title)?>however, if you want to include links or other HTML code, the following should be used:
<?= $title ?>
The 1st escape includes a method similar to PHP htmlspecialcharacters(), and as such any HTML will be rendered as text.
Project
You can find all the information about Plates here at their project’s home.