I am currently develop a website application in codeigniter, and I’d like to do something in PHP / CodeIgniter where I can make a common template for separate sections of the website. I was thinking that I would keep the header / footer in a separate php files & include them separately.
The thing I’m not sure about is the content beneath the header and above the footer. This website application will contain a lot of different pages, so I’m having a hard time figuring how what’s the best way to do this.
1
I generally prefer to create a “layout” file rather than having to include both a header and footer on every page. It’s more flexible.
Here’s a snippet from one of my projects:
ob_start();
include '../views/'.$templateFile;
$pageContent = ob_get_clean();
include '../views/layouts/'.$layoutFile;
All you have to do is enable output buffering, include the template, then call ob_get_clean() to nab the contents of your template and put it into a variable. Once it’s in a variable you can include your main layout file, which should echo $pageLayout somewhere inside.
e.g.,
<html>
<head>
<title>Your Site</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- header here -->
<?= $pageContents ?>
<!-- footer here -->
</body>
</html>
That said, surely Code Igniter has some kind of templating built in, no? I’m not familiar with it. Edit: Apparently it does not. Kind of silly really; with caching, the performance cost of a nice templating engine is negligible.
You can use Hook , or giving the parameter in every your method.
Example :
Class My_controller extends CI_Controller{
public function index(){
$data = array(
'container' => 'contain'
);
$this->load->view('base_view', $data);
}
}
and also give your base_view.php (as a main view) the value from your sended variable.
<html>
<head>
<title>Your title here</title>
</head>
<body>
<header></header>
<section id="container">
<?php $this->load->view($container); ?>
</section>
<footer></footer>
</body>
Hope that helps..
1
Something I use most of the time, is just three (or more) views in the controller, like this:
class Mycontroller extends CI_Controller {
public function index() {
$headerData['title'] = 'Title of the page';
$yourData['content'] = 'Everything you want to do inside your controller';
$this->load->view('template/header',$headerData);
$this->load->view('template/page',$yourData);
$this->load->view('template/footer');
}
}
This way you can also set, for example, a title in your header file.
edit: you can extend this with, for example, menu views or something to keep things even more seperated. Just make sure that you load the views in correct order.
I always used to create systems with CodeIgniter and this template library: http://www.williamsconcepts.com/ci/codeigniter/libraries/template/
It’s very simple to use and it can do a better job than yours used techniques like using only $this->load->view() method.
1