PHP Templates

If you need to squeeze out every inch of performance from your application, it's hard to beat the vanilla PHP. You can define your templates by using the vanilla PHP classes.

You should familiarize yourself with Responders and Dependency Injection before using PHP Templates.

You should be sure that you need this kind of performance before deciding to use pure PHP instead of Twig or any other templating engine.

Usage

Writing PHP Templates

There is no "best" way to handle pure PHP templates, but one way to handle them is to use templates as Responders that you can forward your requests into. That makes them reusable.

Template file:

php
<?php

use Distantmagic\Resonance\HttpResponder;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

readonly class MyBlogPostTemplate extends HttpResponder
{
    public function __construct(
        private string $title, 
        private string $content,
    )
    {
    }

    public function respond(ServerRequestInterface $request, ResponseInterface $response): ResponseInterface
    {
        return $response->with($this->createStream(<<<HTML
        <html>
            <head></head>
            <body>
                <h1>{$this->title}</h1>
                <p>{$this->content}</p>
            </body>
        </html>
        HTML));
    }
}

Responder:

php
<?php

use Distantmagic\Resonance\HttpResponderInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

readonly class MyResponder implements HttpResponderInterface
{
    public function respond(ServerRequestInterface $request, ResponseInterface $response): HttpResponderInterface
    {
        return new MyTemplate('title', 'content');
    }
}

Extending Templates, Creating Layouts

Let's say you need to have a common layout that you need to share between multiple pages. One way to do so is to use OOP inheritance:

Please keep in mind that compiled and cached Twig templates are almost no different than this approach, as Twig produces PHP classes that emit strings.

Using vanilla PHP would still be more performant, but make sure you need this kind of performance.

php
<?php

use Distantmagic\Resonance\HttpResponder;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

abstract readonly class MyBaseTemplate extends HttpResponder
{
    abstract protected function renderBodyContent(Request $request, Response $response): string;

    public function respond(ServerRequestInterface $request, ResponseInterface $response): ResponseInterface
    {
        return $response->withBody($this->createStream(<<<HTML
        <html>
            <head></head>
            <body>
                <nav>my navigation menu</nav>
                {$this->renderBodyContent($request, $response)}
            </body>
        </html>
        HTML));
    }
}

Then in other pages:

php
<?php

use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

readonly class MyBlogPost extends MyBaseTemplate
{
    protected function renderBodyContent(ServerRequestInterface $request, ResponseInterface $response): string
    {
        return 'Hello!';
    }
}

Finally, you should use new MyBlogPost() in your Responders.