converting html website to simple PHP templated site

Question

I've got a simple website of a friend. It is setup with 15 or so html pages which follow the same template. I've been asked to take a look at it and change a thing or two. The work is easy if it were not for it being duplicated so heavily.

What is a good templating engine for PHP that I could use to make it so that I only need to make layout changes in one file instead of ~15?

I suppose all I really need to do is define a single function, where the function contains the template code, and the caller specifies the inner html to use... But I suppose there may be a better tool for this in the PHP world that I am unaware of.

Answer 1

You may lookup Smarty . This is one option of a very stable templating engine which is pretty long in the wild. Another thing would be to take something more recent like Mustache .

Answer 2

For a simple web site of a dozen of pages just create a couple of PHP files with common parts. Eg header.php and footer.php and then include these files in all your static pages.They'll look like

<? include "header.php"; ?>
Actual content goes here ....
<? include "footer.php"; ?>

It's a common approach. Actually, footer.php and header.php may be complex and include other.php files (eg top_menu.php, news.php, secondary_menu.php, and so on)

In your case a kind of CMS or a framework would be an overhead.