PHPTAL PHP Template Attribute Language

Introduction

PHPTAL is a PHP implementation of ZPT work. To be short, PHPTAL is a XML/XHTML template library for PHP.

While most web developpers continue to use ASP/JSP/PHP tags as the core language of their templates, the Zope community came with a refreshing idea named TAL. The idea was to move presentation actions inside XHTML attributes instead of using plain tags or elements.

Let's start with a simple PHP exemple (usually reproduceable in ASP/JSP):

<?php foreach ($values as $value): ?>
<div class="item">
  <div class="title">
    <?php if ($value->hasDate()): ?><?=$value->getDate()?><?php endif; ?>
    <a href="<?= $value->getUrl() ?>"><?= 
		htmlentities($value->getTitle()) 
	?></a>
  </div>
  <div class="content">
    <?= htmlentities($value->getContent()) ?>
  </div>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Let's have a look at the TAL way:

<div class="item" tal:repeat="value values">
  <div class="title">
    <span tal:condition="value/hasDate" tal:replace="value/getDate"/>
    <a tal:attributes="href value/getUrl" tal:content="value/getTitle"/>
  </div>
  <div id="content" tal:content="value/getContent"/>
</div>

Now it's up to you to choose which version you prefer. Of course those tal:condition, tal:replace and tal:repeat may looks strange when begining with TAL.

Just for fun let's modify this example:

<div class="item" tal:repeat="value values">
  <div class="title">
    <span tal:condition="value/hasDate" tal:replace="value/getDate">
      2008-10-06
    </span>
    <a href="sample.html" 
      tal:attributes="href value/getUrl" 
      tal:content="value/getTitle">
      My item title
    </a>
  </div>
  <div class="content" tal:content="value/getContent">
    This is a sample content which is replaced by the
    real content when the template is run with real
    data.
  </div>
</div>

More in the manual.

Some PHPTAL advantages and features:

• enforces the separation between logic and presentation (the holy grail),
• warns you if you forget to close an HTML tag or have syntax errors in your template,
• no more htmlentities(),
• quite clean and readable templates,
• ability to insert sample text inside template to preview template result without PHP backend,
• integrates quite well with WYSIWYG HTML editors,
• data abstraction using XPath-like system,
• cool HTML macro system,
• integrated internationalization system (using gettext or your own backend),
• ability to replace XPath-like system with PHP expressions,
• nearly no speed loss (templates are compiled, expensive expressions can be replaced with plain PHP).
• compatible with PHP accelerators, which can improve performance even further,
• more than four years of ZPT community support (see zope website),
• extensible and easily hackable code,
• makes good use of PHP5 and SPL.

Some PHPTAL drawbacks:

• a dependency for your application,
• some TAL, METAL, I18N and PHPTAL attributes to understand,
• you'll have to produce clean XHTML.