I've been on a project with a buddy who is leading us with Middleman. We are coding in HAML and SASS and he's obviously a Ruby Dev. I'd like to know if there's ANY type of equivalent for PHP? I'm going to eventually lead a team and I'm much more comfortable with PHP than Ruby.
I'd like to have a layout file (like Zend's layout file)
I'd like to...at one command, convert all of the source files from PHP to static HTML and place those static files in a 'build' folder so we can hand it over to the client.
Anyone know of some cool things out there to make this happen? Thanks a bunch!
A project I work on, www.findbigmail.com, was written completely in PHP to start with and then I did some Ruby/Rails work for a different project, and coming back to PHP was a grind. After using HAML, SCSS and other wonderful things like CSS and JS minify, oh and Compass to build sprites, it was painful to go back to PHP and work again in PHP files with embedded HTML etc.
So, driven by pure slothfulness, I looked around and found MiddleManApp (MM) - after a couple of side trips along the way.
Now we have a very strong separation between what is now a mostly static html site built by MM, with some PHP files that are POSTed to and then redirect back to html pages. Where we need more dynamic behaviour, we've added javascript to the pages and have them call PHP API wrappers around our pre-existing code.
Our site performance has jumped hugely (doh, now its all static html), and its poised to take another jump when the next MiddleMan version comes out with its improved cache-busting abilities inherited from the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. E.g. we'll be able to reference main.css in our source scripts (which itself is made up of sub-scss files like _index.scss, _pricing.scss) and it will be built with references to main-2348jlk23489kdj.css -- allowing us to set the server to cache for a year and/or deploy many more files to CDN.
Our engineering performance is way up too. We're no longer reluctant to touch UI code for fear of introducing a syntax error into the PHP code. And no more mismatched HTML tags to cause grief. The other PHP developer wasn't familiar with the Ruby/Rails derived toolchain, but has quickly become proficient (though he is a rockstar developer, so that's not too surprising!)
Coming soon is i18n support. Most of that is in MM already and hopefully Javascript support
real-soon-now.
We also explored generating pages from HAML with PHP added to them. We decided it was probably quite simple - e.g. add a ":php" tag to the HAML pipeline and then use .php partials as needed. But, we found that between Javascript and wrapping the existing PHP code as an "engine API", we were able to keep the codebases neatly separated -- which we found we prefer overall.
I hope this helps! Happy to explain more.
There is one for PHP called Piecrust.
I ended up choosing Middleman for the bundled coffeescript, sass, etc., but Piecrust is well done.
http://bolt80.com/piecrust/
PHP can render static HTML from PHP code quite easily:
Easiest way to convert a PHP page to static HTML page
Generate HTML Static Pages from Dynamic Php Pages
PHP - How to programmatically bake out static HTML file?
You could wire up something with existing template systems like Twig or use PHP Markdown to more or less mimic what Middleman is doing and create static HTML pages from your source files.
EDIT: As Hari K T mentioned above, http://www.phrozn.info/en/ does exactly this.
Related
When working on the front-end development of a website (HTML structure, styling with Sass, style/animation related JavaScript), do you do it already with a CMS (Cake, WordPress, whatever) wrapped around it, or do you first work on the front-end with static/placeholder content?
In case you create all the static HTML/CSS first, and implement the CMS just once you have a nice HTML structure and the stylesheets defined, how THE HELL do you create your templates (header, footer, etc) without PHP?
Just because I'm very attached to some stuff like Gulp, browserSync, Sass, autoprefixer, sourcemaps, jshint, wiring dependencies from bower, etc, and I just can't find a way to use all that with PHP for creating some simple templates, and apparently zero person give a damn about it.
It actually seems to be very easy and I'm kind of close to it, but I can't understand now how wiredep works, and I've had enough of that already, and I'm starting to feel very bad about it, and I'm kind of alone in my desk here and I just can't break free from my stubbornness.
I would love to read you people thoughts on that issue.
Here's my specific question on that:
Gulp-webapp running BrowserSync and PHP
I know things like these have been asked and answered several times before, is it just that I can't grasp the idea easily or too hard to accept that things are really like this and that.
I know that HTML is used for Front-End where the tedious work is done in the Client, and PHP is working behind the scenes (Server-Side). With so many regulations, instruction, standards, so on and so forth.. I believed I have already confused myself with these stuffs, making things (new and old) hard for me to chew and understand especially when it comes to their best uses...
Anyway, I have created a web application based on the concept of MVC tho I didn't used the strong fundamentals of the topic nor a framework, I separated the Logic, Rules and Design concerns by my own.
Unfortunately, I wound up with some issues similar to which is the right way to do the things, how this should be implemented, etc...
I end up needing to template the HTML, however, since I've used HTML as HTML itself, I end up updating/editing each and every affected file (for. eg. a web page header), unlike when I used PHP before, literally a file with a .php extension, where I can fully utilize templating, however, i read somewhere that it is not a good practice because it breaks the HTML.. so which one should I follow and how can I solve my problem, should I move to .php and then create a template page, or is there a way I could do such with HTML? if there is any, how can it be done?
Please for the meantime, don't point me to frameworks available, I want to understand basic things first before studying frameworks...
Anyone, please...
Edit...
so this is just fine and that it doesn't have any drawbacks...
main.php
<?php php stuffs ?>
<html>
<body>
HTML stuffs and some <?php php stuffs ?>
</body>
</html>
HTML has no templating capability.
It has frames and iframes, but they come with significant drawbacks and only provide include functionality.
You should use a proper templating language. This can run on the client, server or build system.
I'd recommend against running it on the client. It adds an unnecessary dependency that your visitors (including search engine indexers) have to fulfil.
PHP will do the job (it straddles the border of being a programming language and a templating language). My personal preference is for Template-Toolkit.
TT can run in your build system via the ttree utility, or you can run it on your server. There is a tutorial covering how to build websites using it.
If, and when, you move to building websites with more demanding server side requirements, then you can continue to use TT as it is supported but most of the web frameworks in Perl land (e.g. the dancer module for TT and the catalyst module for TT. Note that those links go to the hardcode documentation for the modules, and if you plan to use one of the frameworks you should start with a higher level tutorial)
HTML is a markup language - in other words it can mark up text to display to the user.
It cannot do any of the dynamic type functions you might need in a web application - like updating the date, for example.
So it is best to think of HTML documents, just like you might think of a Word document, a load of text that is displayed to the user.
As soon as you want to start using templates to display dynamic information (stuff from a database, maybe), you're going to need a scripting language. PHP is good for this.
I've had good experience with Smarty - a php templating engine.
On a side note, learning a framework can be a really useful part of the learning the basics. Most frameworks force you to do things in a good way, and sometimes the things they make you write in your code may seem a bit strange or illogical, suddenly one day the penny will drop and you'll realise why what you've been forced to do is sound from an engineering point of view.
You can look # javascript templating. I suggest you to give a try to http://mustache.github.com/
Modest is a template system that's supposed to look and feel like HTML.
The most common way to do HTML templating with PHP, is to use one of these popular templating engines :
Smarty
Twig
Latte
Mustache
Alternatively, you can just put placeholders in your HTML that look something like <% variablename %>. Just load your HTML, do a regex do find all placeholders and replace them with the corresponding variables.
Alternatively, you can load your HTML, parse it as a DOM document and then modify your DOM. I created the library DOM Query to be able to do this with a jQuery-like syntax, but you could use vanilla PHP or one of several other libraries as well.
Alternatively, you can do some HTML templating in frontend with JavaScript. If you want to do HTML templating both on frontend and backend, you might want to consider using Mustache, because Mustache templates can be used both in frontend (with JavaScript) and in backend (with PHP).
I'm looking for recommendations on how to do some reporting in PHP. Specifically, I need PDF rendering and I would like to separate the presentation from my code as much as possible (templates of some sort?).
I've recently received a PHP4 code-base on the job and am in charge of upgrading to PHP5. The reports currently are created via TCPDF which are driven from HTML generated straight from PHP. The upgrade process is proving extremely challenging. I'm running into multiple problems with TCPDF where it will just go into an infinite loop and never return. Through some troubleshooting and forum posts, it appears we're doing some stuff that TCPDF4 with PHP4 didn't have a problem with but TCPDF5 and PHP5 does. Unfortunately, rather than error on whatever rules we're breaking, I just get infinite hangs. Our in-house code could use some refactoring and I feel a re-write could mitigate many of these problems, however I'm not opposed to looking beyond TCPDF right now.
Our code also has a lot of the HTML generation mixed in with the rest of the reporting features. I would really like to separate this out so that little to no PHP code is required when editing or creating a report. I don't need anything too fancy for the report. Needs to support basic data tables and multiple horizontal panes on a single tab. There are charts but they are currently generated by a separate package and just read directly as an image. Suggestions on the best way to re-do these reports? Thanks.
You can use PHP as a template engine, and than you can convert the HTML output to a PDF.
Here are the options for PHP templating:
Use Smarty, it's pretty easy and has it's own template language, but I think that it's for your usages a bit overhad.
Or you can use just plain PHP, just put the templates code into a sepearated directory and create a function render_template('template_name.php') or something like this.
In your case, I think that you could write your own class for the handling of reports. Here just a simple sketch of the usage:
<?php
$report = new Report(1234); // report id
$report->template = 'default'; // or something different
$report->addField('Users', array('Claire', 'Fred', 'Kevin'), array('renderArray' => true));
$report->addField('Note', '<p>This report was generated automatically.');
So, eventually you can use some of the simple ideas behind this simple sketch.
I hope that I understood your question correctly, and that I could help you with this answer.
I've created some dynamic PDF using multiple classes : separating PDF and Pdf design, from data access and management
I have one abstract class that you can use for all your reports. this class handles the PDF generation (all the set up), and you may design some styles ("writeTitle1()"), or helper methods to render data. ex "writeReportTable()"
If you plan on keeping a system that converts html2pdf, this class can generate some html too, or call any templating engine.
In my design, this class generally wraps the PDF engine. (I often use Cezpdf)
Then for each report, a child class that focuses on data management : getting and formatting the data, then calling the rendering method.
This is a first step to gain some visibility : independant layers.
I have started coding in clojure, and I'm really impressed by Enlive. One thing that I really like about it is that Enlive uses html-only templates. So a template is a file with html in it, ending in .html, simple as that. It gets parsed into a dom tree and then that dom tree is manipulated by clojure/enlive, combined, made dynamic, etc. No syntax in the html template files, a beautifully clean separation.
Another example of a similar system, done via javascript, is PURE.
Is there anything like that in php?
Or, in general, any ways of doing html-only templating?
Fascinated to hear of Enlive. I've been thinking about this concept for a few years and have hacked together something in PHP that shares some principles: templates are pure HTML, and you "fill" them by addressing content to a specific node in the document using CSS or XPath.
$t = new Template('yourfile.html');
$t->fill('#nav',$someMarkup);
$t->fill('#header',$otherMarkup);
I also experimented with throwing together some provisions for separating the content out into a "stylesheet" of sorts... well, "stylesheet" is the wrong word. I'm calling them content-addressing sheets (the project is called CAST, for content-addressed-style-templating). A CAS looks like you might expect:
.col #foot {
content: 'foot';
}
#content {
content: file_get_contents('pangolin.txt');
}
The values of content are assumed to be PHP expressions. There's some provision for setting up PHP that applies across selectors, too.
Take a run of the cssfill.php script that's in the tarball (best invocation is probably ./cssfill.php pangolin.cas pangolin.html, you might have to change the path to your php interpreter inside cssfill.php), take a look at the output, compare with the input files.
If this post generates any enthusiasm for the idea in you, feel free to let me know. I've been wondering whether this was a crazy idea or whether it has a place, if it does, I'd be happy to turn it into a thoughtfully released open source project as opposed to a tarball randomly tossed onto the internet.
You can check phptal.org. It's a template engine for PHP that uses HTML tags.
But it's not that fast.
You can also check other projects like twig-project.org witch is waaay faster.
Checkout PHPTAL.
PHPTAL is a XML/XHTML template library for PHP5 which provides compiled templates and fine-grained caching.
Templates are defined in pure XML/HTML markup.
<div class="item" tal:repeat="item itemsArray">
<span tal:condition="item/hasDate" tal:replace="item/getDate"/>
<a href="${item/getUrl}" tal:content="item/getTitle"/>
<p tal:content="value/getContent"/>
</div>
Interesting starts. But I'm impressed why we can't have diferent template with specimen text to change the view and the different state of elements - and extract the code to create exiting template systems or just fill it up with content. Find the workflow feels so broken an complicate - don't like mixing html with php / js nor writing abstract template systems. Need to much brain - to much commication without easy visualisations.
I think Psttt! templating engine for php is exactly what are you looking for, it keeps your html template intact allowing you to better reuse your htmls.
full source code here http://github.com/givanz/psttt
I've been looking for some guidelines on how to layout PHP code. I've found some good references, such as the following:
http://www.dagbladet.no/development/phpcodingstandard/
and this question on SO.
However, none of that quite gets to what I'm specifically wondering about, which is the integration of HTML and PHP. For example:
Is it OK to have a PHP file that starts out with HTML tags and only has PHP inserted where needed? Or should you just have one section of PHP code that contains everything?
If you have a chunk of PHP code in the middle of which is a set of echo's that just output a fixed bit of HTML, is it better to break out of PHP and just put in the HTML directly?
Should functions all be defined in dedicated PHP files, or is it OK to define a bunch of functions at the top of a file and call them later on in that same file?
There are probably other questions I'd like to ask, but really I'm looking for someone to point me at some kind of resource online that offers guidance on the general idea of how HTML and PHP should be combined together.
Combining programming code and output data (including HTML) is IMHO a very bad idea. Most of the PHP gurus I know use a template engine such as Smarty to help keep the two things separate.
There's really not a single, common standard for these things. Most languages are more restrictive than PHP in this sense.
In the later years, a lot of so-called frameworks have emerged, and amongst other things they define a set of rules for everything from naming over where to place files and to which style your code should follow. There are several frameworks around, so you can't really pick one and call it the standard. However, most frameworks have a subset of commonality. For example, most follows some variant of the PEAR Coding Standards.
I usually try and follow the standards that are set by the language's core libraries.... oh wait.
Seriously through - you should try and follow the MVC pattern in any web application as it is pretty much standard practice regardless of language. In PHP this can be achieved in a quick-and-dirty way by treating index.php as your controller and separating data logic and presentation by file. This small step will at least let you move your code to a full featured framework when and if you choose.
Use a template engine when you can. If you haven't learned one, or don't want the overhead (which is minimal), use practices that cause you to have quick-and-dirty templating:
Functions that do not display anything have no place in a file that does display something.
Print variables, not HTML. Whenever outputting HTML, break out of the PHP and write HTML with print statements to handle any small details that are needed (actions for forms, IDs for controls, etc.).
Remember, when you include a file that breaks out of the PHP to print content, that will be treated the same as if you do it in the main file. So you can create simple templates that just included PHP files, and those files will print variables in the right places. Your index.php (or whatever) does all the real work, but all the display is done by the secondary "template".
Many PHP tutorials intermix logic and display code. It took me years to break the bad habits that encouraged in me. In my experience you can't separate things too much in PHP, and entropy will pull you towards intermixed code if you don't fight it.
Coding standards should be more than how to layout your syntax, but sadly that's what they tend to be in PHP.
FWIW, phc will pretty print your code in the Zend style.