Template Engine, what is it for?

Without a Template Engine, your PHP program looks like this:

HTML and PHP are embedded with each other in the same page.

• It takes a long time to code.
• It's hard to read.
• It's not simple to perform maintenance.
• It's complicated to manage several pages in one program.
• It needs a programmer good at coding HTML.

With a Template Engine, your program looks like this:

There is one program with pure PHP and one template with pure HTML.

The Template Engine (TinyButStrong) enables you to merge the HTML page with data from your program. The engine is simple and powerful. It offers lots of tools and automatisms to make your program light and crystal clear.

At the HTML side, it is also much more simple. You design a standard HTML page in which you put locators for the merge. You will be able to view your template as a normal Web page. If you don't know HTML, your template can be designed without problem using a visual editor such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.

But there are many more benefits:

The Template Engine also enables you to easily manage:

• The choice of a page among a set of possible pages.
• The inclusion of a page inside another like frames.
• The presentation of data coming from databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC or SQL-Server.
• Display or hide an area based on the value of a PHP variable.
• ...

And a Template Engine is very much appreciated by professionals because the PHP development can be given to one person and HTML development to another. Page design can be changed without programming changes like with any RAD tools (Rapid Application Development) such as Delphi, Visual Basic,...