Simple web page layout and templating in PHP

Question

In the past I've written sites in ASP.NET just to get nice reusable templating via master pages (layouts) and user controls (partials). I'm talking about sites that have no more complicated code in them than simple variable substitution in templates - I'm just using it to keep my HTML organized. It's great to be able to define the basic layout of your page in one file, and then just fill in the holes for each individual page, re-using some common bits as user controls.

However, I'd rather not continue using Windows hosting, so I'd like to write static pages in PHP, which runs everywhere. In the past I've written myself a poor-man's user control for PHP that just unpacks an array and includes a template, but that's clunky and still requires me to put PHP includes all over my pages. I feel like Smarty or one of the other big templating languages for PHP is overkill for just organizing some "static" pages.

I've considered just doing the pages in Ruby on Rails because I really like HAML/SASS and the layout/partial model, but having a whole rails app for static content seems silly. But I haven't found anything that seems just right in PHP. Can any PHP gurus recommend anything? I want something more sophisticated than "include" but I don't really need much. That said, something that could give me layouts/partials AND HAML/SASS would be heaven. I've looked at phammable but it doesn't look like it solves the layout/partial problem.

Again, I'm not looking for something as complex as Smarty, and I don't want a full CMS. I just want something that will let me properly modularize the HTML of my site. We're talking one step beyond static HTML here.

Answer 1

Zend_View supports layouts, partials and placeholders. Also checkout a new templating language called Dwoo which is similar to Smarty but also takes some ideas from Django templating. And finally, Calypso which is a Django template language clone for PHP