What do you use?

What methoud do you use when it comes to html-templates? Do you have a file with a list of all variables with html-values and just include() 'em? or do you write a single template file per html section and fopen() 'em? Or anything else?

I'd like to know your opinions about it, what's faster, better etc Thanks

Myself I just open a html-file and replace all the variables by its values (so I have a single template file per html-page/section)

never mind it's too elite for you guys

Lol - do a search a the forum and you will find a few threads asking/discussing template systems.


Opinions about what? Templating systems are far more than what you described in your post. Provide more detail please...

Personally I don't like templating systems I prefer to write dynamic code that generates its own page depending on what the user wants to do.. templates limit what you can and can't do IMHO

But, if I were going to use some sort of "template" I would make an external file, and do it with a CSS

Well if you are working with a team of 3 programmers and 3 designers you have to split the html-code and the programming-code

But I've been googling for it and now I'm using Smarty It's very powerful, a bit too much though, it asks quite some education for the designers...which is too bad

Ah.. I see what you mean then

How could you not use templates? What happens if you have a 30 page site and you want to change the colour of the nav background?

Well I don't have a 30 page site right now and since all of my code is dynamicly generated right now, it automatically gets the settings for colors, backgrounds, etc from the database depending on the users settings, and generates the page according to how they want it to look.. so I guess I do use templates

I use CSS and PHP includes for my sites usually, it is quite the combination, I would use the user-preference templates if I knew how to though because that is a cool feature to have on the site.