It seems you may be more comfortable with developing in PHP you let this hold you back from utilizing the full potential with web applications.
It is indeed possible to have PHP render partials and whole views, but I would not recommend it.
To fully utilize the possibilities of HTML and javascript to make a web application, that is, a web page that acts more like an application and relies heavily on client side rendering, you should consider letting the client maintain all responsibility of managing state and presentation. This will be easier to maintain, and will be more user friendly.
I would recommend you to get more comfortable thinking in a more API centric approach. Rather than having PHP output a pre-rendered view, and use angular for mere DOM manipulation, you should consider having the PHP backend output the data that should be acted upon RESTFully, and have Angular present it.
Using PHP to render the view:
/user/account
if($loggedIn)
{
echo "<p>Logged in as ".$user."</p>";
}
else
{
echo "Please log in.";
}
How the same problem can be solved with an API centric approach by outputting JSON like this:
api/auth/
{
authorized:true,
user: {
username: 'Joe',
securityToken: 'secret'
}
}
and in Angular you could do a get, and handle the response client side.
$http.post("http://example.com/api/auth", {})
.success(function(data) {
$scope.isLoggedIn = data.authorized;
});
To blend both client side and server side the way you proposed may be fit for smaller projects where maintainance is not important and you are the single author, but I lean more towards the API centric way as this will be more correct separation of conserns and will be easier to maintain.
