tpl format

tpl format crash course

tpl format is a templating system and core component of ShiftLib.

Key advantages of tpl format

• Designer and developer friendly
• Human-readable urls
• Files are more organised
• Less repeated code
• SEO benefits like: Auto page titles / Auto sitemap
• Error reporting
• Powerful set of functions and components at your disposal

tpl format folder structure

root ----
	|
	---- _inc
	|
	---- _lib
	|
	---- _tpl
		|
		----- template.php

_inc folder contains configuration files: namely config.php and custom.php.
_lib folder is where the shiftlib core files reside.
_tpl folder is where all the templates go.
template.php is the main template file.

Anatomy of a template

Webpages from the same website tend to share a lot of the same content. Most webpages will have the same header / navigation / footer and sometimes side navigation. They will then have some content in the middle which is totally unique to that page.

template.php is the content of that typical page minus the unique content. In the place of the unique content is a placeholder:
=$include_content;?>

Adding pages

Adding pages is simple. Just create a file in the template folder e.g. about.php. The file extension is always php. Populate the new file with the unique content. The unique content is the middle part of the page and should not contain any or

tags.

You can now access this page from https:///about
And link to this page like so: about us
note the absence of .php

To create an index page you should call the file index.php

You can also create folders within the _tpl folder. So you could create a folder called news. And within that you could have an index page and an article page.

root ----
	|
	---- _tpl
		|
		----- news
		|	|
		|	----- article.php
		|	|
		|	----- index.php
		|
		----- template.php

These new pages would be accessed like so:

http:///news/article
http:///news/

Multiple templates

In the above example you could also have a completely separate template for the news section. e,g,

root ----
	|
	---- _tpl
		|
		----- news
		|	|
		|	----- article.php
		|	|
		|	----- index.php
		|	|
		|	----- **template.php**
		|
		----- template.php

In this case the template.php in the news folder will be used instead of the one in the root.

Page without template.php

You may need to display a page without having it pulled into template.php at all.
For example you might have a popup window or an iframe.
To prevent the page being pulled into template.php add the following to the bottom of the template:

<?php
exit;
?>

This works because the page template is executed before template.php itself.

Catchers

Catchers are used to route all nested paths to one file e.g. we can create one catcher to serve all these URLs. news/article1 news/article2 news/article3

To create a catcher, use the file extension .catcher.php.

e.g.

root ----
	|
	---- _tpl
		|
		----- news.catcher.php

Then within our catcher file we can get the URL information from the $sections array e.g.

$sections = [
    0 => "news",
    1 => "article1"
]

Auto page titles

Unique page titles are important as they are used by search engines, bookmarks and tabs.

templates are automatically scanned for the first heading tag e.g:

page title

.
The content of the h1 tag can then be used in the page title.

You can add it to your template page like so:

<title><?=$title ? $title : 'default page title';?></title>

The default title is used when the included page does not contain a h1 tag.

These titles can be over-rided on a per-page basis by defining $title at the top of the include.
e.g.

<?php $title='Use this title instead'; ?>

Sitemaps

An XML sitemap is automatically generated and can be sunmitted to google.
It is located here: https:///sitemap.xml

config.php

This file is located in the _inc folder.
It contains the site configuration including database login details and the default email address.

custom.php

This file is located in the _inc folder.
It contains custom functions specific to the site.

404 error page

A 404 error page will be displayed if a template is not found. You can create your own custom 404 page by creating a file called 404.php in the template directory.

You can programatically force a 404 error by adding the following php code:

<?php $trigger_404=true; ?>

This can be useful when working with a database-driven page that returns no results.

Reserved php variables

$include_content Parsed content of the included template.

$title The content of the first H1 tag found in the included template.

$auth An authentication class used to allow users to log into the website.

$request The page request URI.

$current_tab The first item from the sections array

$trigger_404 A boolean that when set to true displays a 404 message.

$sections The URI split into an array separated by '/'

$show_load_time A boolean that when set to true displays the page load time.

Reserved URI

/admin The admin system

/logout Logs a user out of the system and then redirects to the home page.