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Templates
Templates are a View and a Layout combined.
- View in the sense that it renders itself by returning it's output
- Layout in the sense of it incorporating boilerplate stuff (headers, footers, etc)
A simple Template might look like
<html>
<body>
<?php
echo $this->includeBlocks();
?>
</body>
</html>The call to includeBlocks() is the key. That call will iterate over all the
Blocks of content that have been populated by the Controller. Templates store
all their Blocks in a multi-demensional array. The main or default set of
content Blocks are stored in the top of the array.
Panels are a solution to a Layout problem with Templates. When you have a Template that is representing a whole page or screen, you often have multiple places on the screen to put content. A Controller may need to populate not just a main content area, but also a sidebar or header, or whatever.
I've called these panels, but there's not a Panel class or anything like that. As a Template author, a Panel is just a special string name you come up with to declare some portion of the layout.
<html>
<body>
<div id="side">
<?php
echo $this->includeBlocks('side');
?>
</div>
<div id="main">
<?php
echo $this->includeBlocks();
?>
</div>
</body>
</html>In this example, the author decided to have a Panel called, "side". The call
to includeBlocks('side') iterates over all the Blocks that have been put into
$this->blocks['side'].
A Controller would populate this template something like this:
<?php
class SomeController extends Controller
{
public function index(Template $template)
{
$template->blocks[] = new Block('some_main_content_file');
$template->blocks['side'][] = new Block('some_sidebar_content_file');
}
}