Getting started

This is the documentation for Link, an optimized templating engine written in PHP.

It enhances the separation between the logic content and the presentationnal content.

Prerequisites

Link needs at least PHP 5.2.1 to run. It also works perfectly fine with PHP 5.3, 5.4 and 5.5.

Installation

You have multiple ways to install Link. If you are unsure what to do, go with the tarball.

Installing from the tarball release

1. Download the most recent tarball from the download page
2. Unpack the tarball
3. Move the files somewhere in your project

Installing the development version

1. Install Git
2. git clone git://github.com/Taluu/Link-TPL.git

Installing via Composer

1. Install composer in your project:

curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php

2. Create a composer.json file in your project root:

{
  "require": {
    "Taluu/Link-TPL": "1.13.*"
  }
}

3. Install via composer

php composer.phar install

Basic Usage

This section gives you the basics for getting Link TPL to work.

The first step is (considering you choose to use the Git or Tarball installation methods) to include the Link_Autoloader and register it:

require 'path/to/Link/lib/Autoloader.php';
Link_Autoloader::register();

Don’t forget to replace the path/to/Link with the proper path you used to install Link.

Note

Link follows the PSR-0 convention, which allows you to easily integrate Link with other PSR-0 compatible autoloaders (like Composer, Symfony, your-own-autoloader, ...):

$loader = new My\Fancy\Autoloader;

$loader->register(array(
  // ...
  'Link_' => '/path/to/Link/lib',
  // ...
 ));

$loader = new Link_Loader_String;
$cache = new Link_Cache_None;

$link = new Link_Environment($loader, $cache);

// some code logic here...

$link->parse('Hello {name} !', array('name' => 'Baptiste'));

Link uses a loader (Link_Loader_String) to locate templates, a cache engine (Link_Cache_None which actually does... nothing, disabling the cache, even though I really would not recommend it – see below) and an environnement (Link_Environment) to store all the configuration.

The parse() method loads the given templates (here a string), checks if it is more up to date than the data in the cache ; if it is fresher than the cached data, it refreshes it, and, with the given context (specified by the second argument) renders the template.

Note

As, with a templating engine, we may expect to have our templates stored on files, Link comes bundled with a filesystem loader (Link_Loader_Filesystem) and a filesystem cache (Link_Cache_Filesystem):

$loader = new Link_Loader_Filesystem('/path/to/templates');
$cache = new Link_Cache_Filesystem('/path/to/cached/templates');

$link = new Link_Environment($loader, $cache);

// some code logic here...

$link->parse('hello.html', array('name' => 'Baptiste'));

That’s all folks ! :)