Stim is a project mainly written in PHP, it's free.
An unobtrusive template engine for PHP
Stim is designed to be a usable, powerful template editor. Like most template engines it separates HTML from PHP code, however unlike most template engines, the template files contain (almost) no markup. Stim uses classes and ids with a jQuery-like syntax adapted for content insertion:
$page = new Stim(array("file" => "Template.htm"));
$page->find("#menu .title")->text("The title of my website!")->source("http://mywebsite.com/");
echo $page->html();If you're a designer/developer this is great because you can work with HTML in the same way for PHP and Javascript using the same selectors.
However if you're a developer worried about those pesky designers messing around with your classes and ids, you can use Stim's custom selector, stim:id, to identify content. This attribute isn't unique or singular so you can use it just like the class attribute:
$page = new Stim(array("string" =>
"<html>
<div stim:id="menu">
<h1 stim:id="title large">The wrong title!</h1>
</menu>
</html>"
));
$page->find("@menu @title")->text("The right title!");The stim:id attribute is stripped out of the final page for clean, valid HTML!
Stim has a single selector method supporting classes, ids and stim:id:
$page->find("#header .menu @item .big.link @capital@letter")->find(".text");Stim doesn't support element names (eg a.link) or alternative pattern matching (eg .a > .b, .a + .b or .a[foo="bar"]) because these may vary based on the template implementation. For example the designer may add a wrapper element which breaks a .a > .b selector, or change an div element to a ul element, breaking a div.list selector.
The rest of Stim's methods are getter/setters with a very similar behaviour to jQuery. If a value is passed, they will set that value for each element and return the original object, otherwise they will return the value from the first element.
text() sets the inner text, removing any child nodescdata() sets an inner cdata section, removing any child nodeshtml() sets the inner html, removing any child nodesattr($name) sets the $name attribute Stim also supports two context sensitive shortcut methods: source() and val():
source() sets the source file, or hyperlink for an element, it currently supports a, href, style, link, and formval() sets the value of form fields, it currently supports input, textarea and optionThe final two methods are the best ones! These are for inserting lists of content, you know: articles, comments, tags, menu links, etc. These methods group selected elements which are adjacent into lists, here's an example:
$page = new Stim(array("string" =>
"<html>
<div>
<div class="item">1</div>
<div class="item">2</div>
<div class="item">3</div>
</div>
<div class="item">4</div>
<div class="item">5</div>
<br>
<div class="item">6</div>
</html>"
));
$items = $page->find(".item");In this example $items has six elements which would be grouped into three lists, since the first three are inside a div, and the last three are split with a br element.
each($data, $function) calls $function with the nth element from each list and the nth item from $datainsert($data, $function) resizes each list to the size of $data, then does the same as each()Here's a quick example which calls insert() recursively, to add comments to articles!
$articles = array(
array(
"body" => "Some article!",
"comments" => array(array("body" => "Some comment!"))
),
array(
"body" => "Some other article!",
"comments" => array()
),
array(
"body" => "Some other, other article!",
"comments" => array(array("body" => "Some other comment!"), array("body" => "Some other, other comment!"))
)
);
$page->find("#page .article")->insert($articles, function($item, $article) {
$item->find(".body")->html($article['body']);
$item->find(".comments .comment")->insert($article['comments'], function($item, $comment) {
$item->find(".body")->text($comment['body']);
$item->find(".author")->text($comment['author']);
});
});Sub templates are really simple with Stim, I'm not even going to explain it:
$page = new Stim(array("file" => "Template.htm"));
$tags = new Stim(array("file" => "SubTemplate.htm"));
$page->find("#tags")->html($tags->find("#tags")->html());Stim requires PHP's DOM which is automatically enabled for most PHP installations.
The Stim methods insert() and each() require function passing. Ideally you should use anonymous functions (used in the examples) which require PHP 5.30 or above.
However, for older versions of PHP you can use variable functions instead.
Unfortunately PHP's DOM doesn't support XHTML correctly (self closing tags are not closed), however any other version of HTML, including HTML5, is supported.
PHP's DOM doesn't support CDATA when loading an HTML file, so Stim templates can't include CDATA.
cdata() method uses the createCDATASection() method, which doesn't add CDATA tags (this may be a bug). Currently, these tags are added manually, and are commented out in script tags to prevent Javascript errors.