Template language vs. straight PHP

Question

I'm going to write a CMS, but right now I'm writing down all my ideas and trying to get all of my concepts straight before I start. One of the things I'm torn on is whether to use a template language and parse the pages of the website, and replace template tags with content items, or just develop the site with straight PHP and have the CMS generate data structures which help. For example:

{navigation: products}

vs.

foreach($cms_label['products'] as $product) {

    echo '<li class="product_nav">'.
         '<a href="products/{$product.id}">{$product.name}</a>'.
         "</li>\n";

}

The former is cleaner but it would involve inventing a language, plus parsing every page before display. The latter is less clean but I think it could work really great if the CMS just provided data for all the code. But, would this be considered mixing logic with presentation? Another alternative I've considered is using PHP functions that are similar to the template tags:

<?php navigation('products'); ?>

What are your thoughts?

Keep in mind I don't have to do anything more complicated than including a page at a certain place, or writing out an unordered list; the rest shall be handled by CSS.

Answer 1

Template languages for PHP are an example of an anti-pattern called "Inner-Platform Effect." Smarty is an example of a template framework for PHP, but even Hasin Hayder, author of a book on Smarty says that Smarty is dead and there's no need to use it anymore.

There can be good reasons to develop a template language, for example if you are having non-coder designers or content editors using your CMS and you don't want to overwhelm them with the complexity of PHP (or allow them to write code that could break your website).

But you haven't described that as a goal, so I'd assume using PHP as your page template language is best in this case. It'll be less work because you don't have to develop your own new language, and it'll provide greater flexibility for uncommon cases where you need a specific kind of dynamic content.

Don't write PHP functions to encapsulate blocks of HTML output. Instead, use include() to pull in fragments of HTML. This technique is sometimes called "partials."

You can also use an MVC framework such as Symfony, Kohana, Solar, CodeIgniter, or Zend Framework to help you keep discipline about separating your PHP template code from the rest of your application code.