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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T09:50:35+00:00

I used PHP years ago but have since been developing in C#/VB.Net. In ASP.Net

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I used PHP years ago but have since been developing in C#/VB.Net.

In ASP.Net MVC 2, you can provide a master page which defines content areas eg:

<html>
    <head>
        <title>Overshare | <?=$Title?></title>              
        <ContentArea name="Head"/>
    </head>
    <body>
        <ContentArea name="Body"/>
    </body>
</html>

Your view would then have something like:

<Content name="Head">
    <!-- Some Head Content -->
</Content>
<Content name="Body">
    <h1>Some Body Here</h1>
</Content>

I don’t seem to be able to emulate the same functionality with Code Igniter. The options seem to be:

  • manually pre-set some associative array of variables (eg in the controller) and then simply substitute the values into a template file – This is a lot of code to repeat in each view and doesn’t belong in the controller. It also means it’s a real pain to put large bodies of html into one of the ContentAreas – It’s either string concatenation or something equally nasty with almost no chance of HTML intellisense in any IDE.
  • Use a templating library – I haven’t found one which doesn’t fundamentally work as described above

Now, I haven’t used CodeIgniter before and am about to start a large PHP project so want to make sure it’s the correct tool before actually starting work. Am I missing something obvious or is this templating functionality difficult to replicate?

Edit: Libraries tested:

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I ended up creating 3 files which represented the following

    OpenHeader:

    <html>
    <head>
        <Head Stuff/>

    OpenBody:

        </head>
    <body>
        <html>
            <Templating Stuff>

    Close:

                </Templating Stuff>
        </html>
    </body>
</html>

    And then modified my views to include these three at the appropriate time.

    It’s inelegant but flexible and powerful so it’ll do for now – especially since I can pass varuables eg Page title into the files during the include if I use the CodeIgniter view engine to retrieve them

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