Elefant uses a Mustache-like template syntax that should be familiar to many developers, with a few simple extensions.
Templates compile to pure PHP code before executing, making them fast and lightweight. PHP tags can be used directly in templates as well.
See the template language page for a complete overview with examples of the template syntax.
There are two differences between layout templates and view templates:
layouts folder, whereas views live in the views folder of a particular app.To render a view template, you call $tpl->render() like this:
<?php
echo $tpl->render ('myapp/templatename', array ('name' => 'Joe'));
?>
This will look for a template file named apps/myapp/views/templatename.html, and pass it the array ['name' => 'Joe'], which can then be accessed within the template like this:
<p>Hello, {{name}}</p>
You may nest templates in subfolders of your views folder as well, for example:
<?php
echo $tpl->render ('myapp/email/welcome', array ('name' => 'Joe'));
?>
This will look for a template file named apps/myapp/views/email/welcome.html.
There are times when complex views begin to bleed presentational logic into a handler, since templates themselves are not very sophisticated by design. Elefant provides a View class to help in these cases.
View::render() differs from $tpl->render() in that it also accepts a callable in place of a template name.
For example:
<?php
echo View::render (function ($params) {
return sprintf ('<p>%s</p>', join (', ', $params));
});
?>
This bypasses the usual template rendering altogether, however you can see that any code within the callable is part of the view rendering. In this way, you can encapsulate additional logic around your template rendering rather easily:
<?php
echo View::render (function ($params) {
if (empty ($params['name'])) {
return View::render ('myapp/newuser', $params);
}
return View::render ('myapp/user', $params);
});
?>
And of course you can offload the callable to a class:
<?php // apps/myapp/lib/UserViews.php
namespace myapp;
use View;
class UserViews {
public static function some_view ($params) {
return View::render ('myapp/some_view', $params);
}
}
?>
And to call it, simply specify your callable method name instead of a template name:
<?php
echo View::render ('myapp\UserViews::some_view', array ('name' => 'Joe'));
?>
Aside from these more complex cases, you can often use View::render() and $tpl->render() interchangeably.
Next: Form handling