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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T23:30:12+00:00

When I write PHP code for websites, I don’t like mixing business logic with

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When I write PHP code for websites, I don’t like mixing business logic with the presentation layer and as such I tend to create markup templates. I’ve written a very lightweight template engine to facilitate this, since I really don’t want to move to a fully-fledged template framework like Smarty.

Here’s a simplified example of what I do:

function renderTemplatePage($page, $params)
{
    $page = readTemplateFile("templates/{$page}");
    $tokens = getTemplateTokens($page);
    foreach($tokens as $token)
    {
        if(substr($token, 0, 6) == "%_TPL_")
        {
            $subPage = renderTemplatePage(tokenToPageName($token), $params);
            $page = str_replace($token, $subPage, $page);
        }
        else
        {
            $page = str_replace($token, $params[$token], $page);
        }
    }
    return $page;
}

Sample page:

<html>
    <head><title>%_PageTitle_%</title></head>
    <body>
        <div id="header">%_TPL_Header_%</div>
        <div id="content">%_TPL_Homepage_%</div>
        <div id="footer">%_TPL_Footer_%</div>
    </body>
</html>

A call to renderTemplatePage("index", array("PageTitle" => "Home")) would produce a page entitled “Home”, with content from the Header, Homepage and Footer templates.

I do all of my logic (including db queries, etc) before calling the rendering, so I can mass up a large $params array and just do a single call to render it all.

Are there any flaws in this methodology? Is there a more standard way to do this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Its flawed. How do you handle template specific logic . Just out of curiosity how would you handle ifs or loops

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