Publications
- FigDice Templating pour PHP - mise en oeuvre.pdf, in GNU/Linux Magazine France, n.158, Mars 2013
- Getting Started With FigDice - SitePoint.com
- Building An Internationalized Blog Using FigDice
Tutorials
Slots & Plugs
This FigDice mechanism is useful when you can factor out a common shape for your all your pages, with various sections whose contents you want to delegate to the actual view your controller is requested for.
Suppose that all your pages contain an HTML header with title, and a menu, and a footer.
All these components are almost the same everywhere, with possibly some slight differences from page to page:
for example, the
controller:
$view = new \figdice\View();
...
$view->loadFile( 'myarticle.html' );
echo( $view->render() );
With this mechanism, for example, you can also provide meta keywords specific to each page,
without the need to duplicate the HTML skeleton in every single page.
In fact, you simply invert the natural inclusion principle: instead of pulling common areas, you push contextual content into externally defined placeholders.
Internationalization
Your application contains multiple views (high-level views rendering complete HTML DOM ; and partial views which you load dynamically with Ajax into your pages). Now you need to translate the views into various natural languages.
You create Dictionaries which provide translations against keys, and you use the keys in your views instead of direct human text.
file: contact.xtml (French Dictionary)
<fig:dictionary xmlns:fig="http://www.figdice.org/" language="fr">
Title">Titre
Lastname">Nom
Firstname">Prénom
DateOfBirth">Date de naissance
NumberOfFriends">Nombre
d'amis
ContactHasNFriends">Ce contact a {numberOfFriends} amis.
fig:dictionary>
You are advised to partition your dictionaries according to consistent feature groups.
That is: put your keys regarding Contact-related screens in a contact.xml dictionary,
and your keys regarding Product-related screens (within the same app) in a product.xml dictionary.
This enables you to:
- potentially reuse your dictionaries across applications,
- reduce the length of your keys, whose names are locally scoped to a given dictionary,
- maintain smaller dictionaries, easier to handle,
- load specialized dictionaries in different views, so as to avoid loading your entire translation book in small views where it is not needed.
You will organize your dictionary files in the following tree:
myproject/lang
+ fr
- contact.html
- product.html
+ de
- contact.html
- product.html
+ es
- contact.html
- product.html
In your Template file, you load and use the dictionaries as follows:
file: view-contact.xml
<fig:dictionary file="product.xml" name="Product" />
<fig:dictionary file="contact.xml" name="Contact" />
<fig:trans dict="Contact" key="ContactHasNFriends" numberOfFriends="count(/customer/friends)" />
Now, before you render the \figdice\View template, you must tell it what is the target language to display:
file: controller.php
$figView = new \figdice\View();
//Tell the View where to find the Dictionary tree:
$figView->setTranslationPath( 'myproject/lang' );
...
$figView->setLanguage( 'fr' );
//The target language will be most probably defined in your session data
...
$html = $figView->render();