Best Practices: What's the Best Way for Constructing Headers and Footers?

Question

What\'s the best way for constructing headers, and footers? Should you call it all from the controller, or include from the view file? I\'m using CodeIgniter, and I\'m wanting

Answer 1

It's bad practice to call views inside of other views. This could be a form of controller view mixing. The view function in CI allows you to pass a third parameter that causes it to return that views output as a string. You can use this to create a compound view.

For example:

class Page extends Controller {
   function index() {
      $data['page_title'] = 'Your title';

      $this->load->view('default_layout', array(
         'header'  => $this->load->view('header' , array(), true), 
         'menu'    => $this->load->view('menu'   , array(), true), 
         'content' => $this->load->view('content', $data  , true), 
         'footer'  => $this->load->view('footer' , array(), true), 
      ));
   }
}

default_layout.php

You may want to combine your header and footer to make a template like this.

class Page extends Controller {
   function index() {
      $data['page_title'] = 'Your title';

      $this->load->view('default_template', array(
         'menu'    => $this->load->view('menu'   , array(), true), 
         'content' => $this->load->view('content', $data  , true), 
      ));
   }
}

default_template.php

Some Header HTML // this is your header html

some footer HTML  // this is your footer html