Layouts With Smarty

12 Apr, 2009

Layouts With Smarty

Smarty doesn’t appear to support layouts, an incredibly useful concept for separating reusable markup in views. Documentation has an example using the {include} tags for including a header and footer template in to each of your views. I think this approach is repetitive and not as flexible as it ought to be.

My expectations:

Single function
Specify view
Specify layout or fallback to default

Fortunately, there is a fetch() function that returns the template output as a string. Taking the earlier example of the header and footer, I wrote a simple wrapper function to do this for me.

<?php
// includes/controllers/base_controller.php
require('Smarty.class.php');

public function __construct()
{
  $this–>smarty = new Smarty();
}

public function render_layout($view, $layout = 'application')
{
  echo(
    $this–>smarty–>fetch('layouts/' . $layout . '/header.tpl') .
    $this–>smarty–>fetch($view) .
    $this–>smarty–>fetch('layouts/' . $layout . '/footer.tpl')
  );
}

<?php
// includes/controllers/items_controller.php
public function show()
{
  $this–>smarty–>assign_by_ref('item', Item::find_by_id($this–>params['id']));
  $this–>render_layout('items/show');
}

While it’s no where near as nice as layouts in Rails, it is a small amount of effort for greater flexibility in your views with Smarty.

tatey.com

Layouts With Smarty