Is there a html-only templates system for php?

Question

I have started coding in clojure, and I'm really impressed by Enlive. One thing that I really like about it is that Enlive uses html-only templates. So a template is a file with html in it, ending in .html, simple as that. It gets parsed into a dom tree and then that dom tree is manipulated by clojure/enlive, combined, made dynamic, etc. No syntax in the html template files, a beautifully clean separation.

Another example of a similar system, done via javascript, is PURE.

Is there anything like that in php? Or, in general, any ways of doing html-only templating?

I've been philosophing about this too. In theory you could collect all html output from your application, pipe it into phpQuery, and then inject the actual content like PURE does it. In theory. — mario
The Hello World Example of PURE can easily be reimplemented with DOM in a dozen lines. It would use XPath for the DOM queries though. If you dont mind learning another markup language, have a look at XSLT. — Gordon
I think the same as Gordon, if you go to the route of implementing something like PURE in PHP(which shouldn't be that difficult), and don't have a DOM engine available, XPATH is the way to go. PURE came from my XSLT past meeting with JSON. But here I disagree with Gordon, I wouldn't go back to XSLT for nothing. — Mic

Weston C Weston C · Accepted Answer · 2010-07-19T03:18:35

Fascinated to hear of Enlive. I've been thinking about this concept for a few years and have hacked together something in PHP that shares some principles: templates are pure HTML, and you "fill" them by addressing content to a specific node in the document using CSS or XPath.

$t = new Template('yourfile.html');
$t->fill('#nav',$someMarkup);
$t->fill('#header',$otherMarkup);

I also experimented with throwing together some provisions for separating the content out into a "stylesheet" of sorts... well, "stylesheet" is the wrong word. I'm calling them content-addressing sheets (the project is called CAST, for content-addressed-style-templating). A CAS looks like you might expect:

.col #foot {
    content: 'foot';
}

#content {
    content: file_get_contents('pangolin.txt');
}

The values of content are assumed to be PHP expressions. There's some provision for setting up PHP that applies across selectors, too.

Take a run of the cssfill.php script that's in the tarball (best invocation is probably ./cssfill.php pangolin.cas pangolin.html, you might have to change the path to your php interpreter inside cssfill.php), take a look at the output, compare with the input files.

If this post generates any enthusiasm for the idea in you, feel free to let me know. I've been wondering whether this was a crazy idea or whether it has a place, if it does, I'd be happy to turn it into a thoughtfully released open source project as opposed to a tarball randomly tossed onto the internet.

Is there a html-only templates system for php?

5 Answers