GoodLooking is a templating engine, which means it helps you to keep your php code seperated from your html. You'll have one file where you do your php programming and one which is the template. Then you need a couple of lines to tell GoodLooking which file to use, and what variables it should use, which can be in a third file, but can also reside in the same file as the programming logic.
Say you have a script that gets the user's first name, last name and birthday out of the database and put them into the variables $firstName, $lastName and $dateOfBirth. Now we write the following code to use LookingGood:
<?phpNote that instead of calling registerVar three times, we could also have called registerMultipleVars once:
$lookingGood = new LookingGood('template.tmpl');
$lookingGood->registerVar('firstName', $firstName);
$lookingGood->registerVar('lastName', $lastName);
$lookingGood->registerVar('birthday', $dateOfBirth);
?>
$lookingGood->registerMultipleVars(array('firstName' => $firstName, 'lastName' => $lastName, 'birthday' => $dateOfBirth));In either case we could have the following Template (in the file template.tmpl):
<html>This could lead to a page named "Hello Jasper!", with the following:
<:- this page is a sample page, and this text is a comment (disappears from result) -:>
<head><title>Hello <: firstName :></title></head>
<body>
<h1>Hello!</h1>
<p>Hello <: firstName; ' '; $lastName :>, my database tells me your birthday is at <: birthday :>.</p>
<: if (firstName == 'Jasper') :>
<p>Have a nice day, Jasper.</p>
<:end if:>
</body>
</html>
Hello!Or if you're your not me, but John Doe, you would get a page named "Hello John!", that looks like this:
Hello Jasper Horn, my database tells me your birthday is at 11/04.
Have a good day, Jasper.
Hello!Well, those are simple examples, but it does really show what the engine is about. So.. INT02, what's new?
Hello John Doe, my database tells me your birthday is at 31/03.
Compiling.
All of it worked, but it was slow. A few hundredths of a second does not appear to be too much, but in reality it is, if you are getting a number of views on your website per second and it's running on a host that's doing other things as well. A more complicated site than the ones I tested may really bog down a server if the work has to be done each and every time.
So, now it only does once, until you change the template, and then it does it once again. That one time it saves a file, which is basically a very messy php representation of your website, which means it is fast to go from there to your full website. And the messiness doesn't matter, because you are not going to see this code at all. For that matter, you are not going to notice the fact it is being compiled this way at all, as all you do is as I wrote above in the example, the engine fixes the rest for you silently.
A working sample is seen on my site. This is the template (view source to see it decently), and I simply put some constants into the engine, and here you see the result in real time.
INT02 does not have much functionality asides the mentioned yet and it has a funny perk, if you had a compile, it will show how long that took in the source, and it will always show how long the interpreting (from the compiled template to the result take) in the the source in html comments.
I won't make GoodLooking available just yet, simply because it is really advisable not to use it in its current state. However, if you really are interested despite that, let me know (for example, you could write a comment here). The next planned version is INT03, which will have one extra feature, after that there's INT04 in which I make a lot of changes and tie quite a few loose ends together. Then, when I feel I am satisfied with that, I will make an alpha version, which will be available.
Alright, thanks for your time (I can imagine, that was quite a read) and see you again some other time!
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