Smarty

leanweb · Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 12:10 am Post subject: template inheritance

sorry if this has been discussed here before, quick search didnt find anything so here it is.

i wonder if this is doable in the present framework of Smary or whether it may be possible in the future. consider this pseudo-template, suppose its in the file base.tpl:

boots · Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 1:12 am Post subject:

This is essentially the same thing that was briefly discussed concerning "overlays". I don't mean to be dismissive because it is a great idea from an overall perspective but I think it speaks to a different layer than Smarty is currently targetted at. I think you can do things to process that type of structure using Smarty but I don't think Smarty is particularly geared to do that internally.

For example, you can use some sort of multi-layered template processing (perhaps using a different set of tags for the layout layer) such that the layout layer is processed and then have the "detail" layer fed into it for final processing. In other words, your detail templates become "data" for your layout templates. It is conceivable but requires two passes through Smarty (one for each layer).

Another option is to create a software layer (perhaps using objects) that deals with the layout and includes a method of selecting appropriate templates for the context. There are many ideas on how to do this and several threads on the forums that speak to it. This is how I approach the layout layer (and have discussed it to some extent in various threads) and the general idea in my approach is to create the layout as an object graph that represents the document structure. You feed the graph into a generalized main processing template which can decompose the graph.

You can see my response regarding overlays here: http://www.phpinsider.com/smarty-forum/viewtopic.php?t=4780

leanweb · Posted: Sat Mar 12, 2005 2:14 am Post subject:

thank you for great response, and not dismissive at all!