Templates in a DB
Our example (which is the same method used on this site), uses a number of
templates stored either in a MySQL database, or in a directory folder. Each template
contains static HTML content, as well as 'variable' tags that will be replaced
with data by your PHP script. Lets take a look at one possible template:
<html>
<head>
<title>$pagetitle</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>$pagetitle</h1>
<p>$pagetext</p>
</body>
</html>
As you can see, the template is made up of standard html elements, but also
includes PHP variables, such as $pagetitle. These will eventually be replaced
with values specified in our script. First however, we'll create a function to
read these templates. In fact, we'll create two, one that uses the database method,
and one that uses the directory method. You can use either, and both will work
in the rest of the tutorial. First, lets create the database function.
function gettemplate($templatename) {
global $templatecache;
#check if template has already been loaded
if ($templatecache[$templatename]!="") {
#return cached version
$template = $templatecache[$templatename];
} else {
#retrieve from database
$query = mysql_query("SELECT
content FROM templates WHERE name='$templatename'");
if (mysql_num_rows($queryid)!=0)
{
#get
the db field
$template
= mysql_result($query,"content");
#replace
\" with \\" ... this will be needed later in the script
$template
= str_replace("\"","\\\"",$template);
#cache
the contents
$templatecache[$name]
= $template;
} else {
$template="";
}
}
return $template;
}
The function is very simple. First, it checks to see if we have a copy of the
template in the cache (to save time accessing the db or file system again). If
it hasn't, then it queries the database, and gets the content field.
Please note that the previous code assumes that you have already established
a connection to the database, and selected the database using mysql_connect
and mysql_select_db. The function also requires a table in the database
called templates, created using the following MySQL statement:
CREATE TABLE templates (
id int unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
name varchar(30) NOT NULL,
content LONGTEXT NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
UNIQUE (name)
);