Hello first sorry if its a stupid question, but I amm a beginner, and im a bit lost.
For practice I decided to code a really small social network just for practice.
I worked on small CodeIgniter projects in the past, and the truth is I dont really like loading the header and footer in every controller.
So on YouTube I saw a video about creating basic templating.
But I can’t really decide whether it is a good idea.
So how would it look like?
In my view folder I created 3 subfolders
- include
- template
- user
In the templates I have the main_template.php and that looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php base_url();?>themes/default/style.css">
<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
The controllers would contain different variables for the title and other stuff if needed for each view.
My question is: is it a bad idea not create header and footer files, and creating all views with including the html, head, and body tag like this?
I would recommend using a “header” and “footer”. Otherwise it’s going to get really messy when you’r trying to customize each template. I get passing down a few variables to the views; actually, that will come in really handy when setting the page’s title, meta description, JS/CSS includes, etc. However if you keep your header/footer together, you will have to either pass the entire body in a variable or pass in the name of the specific view you want; in which case you would have to load the specific view inside this main view.