How to Deal With Codeigniter Templates?

Question

I\'m fairly new to MVC, and I\'ve found CodeIgniter recently. I\'m still learning everyday, but one problem is its template engine. What is the best way to create templates

Answer 1

I use CodeIgniter with Smarty and it's great (if you like Smarty, I do).

Say you have an article controller, you could do somehting like this in it:

class Article extends Controller {
  function show_all() {
    $articles = $this->article_model->get_all();
    $this->smarty->assign('entities', $articles);
    $this->smarty->view('list');
  }
}

And then in your template:

{include file="header.tpl"}
  

  {foreach from=$entities item=entity}
  
{$entity.title}
  {/foreach}
  
{include file="footer.tpl"}

The nice part about this is that the controller doesn't really need to know about headers and footers. It just knows that a group of articles should be shown as a list. From there, it's just the templates that are responsible for defining how a list of things are displayed, in this case, in a ul between a header and footer.

Another cool thing you can do is use this list template for things that aren't articles. You could have a list of users or pages or whatever. In some cases reusing a template like this can be useful. Not always, but sometimes.

Setting up CodeIgniter for smarty is pretty straightforward. It's a matter of copying the Smarty files to your library folder and creating a simple wrapper for it. You can find instructions here:

http://devcha.blogspot.com/2007/12/smarty-as-template-engine-in-code.html

Once you get is set up it's great.