H2O template markup

Being a martial art fan, I burrow a quote.

H2o template

H2O is markup language for PHP that taken a lot of inspiration from django.

Readable and human friendly syntax.
Easy to use and maintain
Encourage reuse in templates by template inclusion and inheritance.
highly extensible through filters, tags and template extensions.
Bundled rich set of filters and tags for string formatting, HTML helpers and internationalization.

Requirement

PHP 5.1 +

News

version 0.4
1. Breaking changes autoescape is now turned on by default
2. Improved searchpath and file loading handling
3. Improved Handling on PHP overloaded objects
4. Plenty of bug fixes
version 0.3
1. Support internationalized templates and translation parsing toolkit
2. Performance optimization on context lookup
3. Fixed operator pasing

Getting started

Getting h2o

Download

With Git

git clone http://github.com/speedmax/h2o-php.git

With SVN

svn checkout http://h2o-template.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ h2o

Installation

Download and extract h2o in your project path or your php include path

Sample file structure setup
```
myawesome_app/
    index.php
    templates/
      index.html
    h2o/
```
use require 'h2o/h2o.php' in your php statement to include h2o library
Below is a quick start code example to get a kick start
checkout example and specs if you are in the mood for exploration.

templates/index.html

<body>
    <head><title>Hello world</title></head>
    <body>
        Greetings {{ name }}
    </body>
</body>

index.php

<?php
    require 'h2o/h2o.php';
    $h2o = new h2o('templates/index.html');
    echo $h2o->render(array('name'=>'Peter Jackson'));
?>

Useful links

Please submit patches or bug report to our lighthouse bug tracker
Checkout Google group for h2o related discussion

Syntax explanation

variable

{{ variable }}

Use dot (.) to access attribute of a variable

variable lookup order

key of associative array
array-index
object attribute
object method call

Example

in your template

{{ person.name }}

in php

<?php 
    $h2o = new H2o('template.tpl');
    $person =array(
            'name' => 'Peter Jackson', 'age' => 25
    );
    $h2o->render(compact('person'));
?>

Let's say you have assigned a person variable in your php script, following variable tag will print out Peter Jackson

Filters

Filters are variable modifiers to manipulate or format the value of a variable. A filter usually look like this {{ person.name|capitalize }}, a pipe ( | ) character after a variable will apply a filter.

Filter chaining

Let me burrow the image from liquid template

You can chain multiple filters together and use a pipe ( | ) character to separate them. {{ document.body|escape|nl2br }}

Filter arguments
Filters can accept arguments for example {{ document.description|truncate 20 }} will display first 20 character of document description. Moreover, there are cases you want to pass multiple arguments and you can use comma( , ) to separate them {{ person.bio|truncate 20, "..." }}

Filter named arguments
h2o uses colon ( : ) to for named arguments to build optional arguments array.

{{ '/images/logo.png' | image_tag width:450, height:250, alt:"company logo" }}

and this translate to php will be this and that is pretty much what happen internally

<?php
    echo image_tag("/image/logo.png", array(
        'width' => 450, 
        'height' => 250, 
        'alt'=>'company logo'
    ));
?>

Note: Difference with Django, Smarty H2o do not use colon ( : ) character to separate arguments for readability reasons, h2o uses comma ( , ) which is more logical.

Tag

{% tag %}

Tags are usually very powerful, they controls the logical flow or structure, iteration. there are inline tags {% inline_tag %} or tags that requires a close tag. for example: {% if condition %} ... {% endif %}

if tag

if tag evaluate a variable or a simple expression. when results true the if tag body will be render or else part will be rendered.

{% if person.is_adult %}
    You are old enough.
{% else %}
    sorry, you are too young for that.
{% endif %}

for tag

For tag will iterate over a array of items.

{% for task in tasks %}
    {{ task }}
{% endfor %}

Above will print all the tasks.

Template inheritance

H2o supports template inheritance, it is very powerful and the concept is easy to understand.

Template inheritance is implemented using block, extends tag, for programmers who is familiar with object oriented principles this is easy.

Quote from Django doc

... a base skeleton template that contains all the common elements of your site and defines blocks that child templates can override.

Example:

base.html - to define the base structure of the page.

<html>
 <head><title>{%block title %}This is a page title {% endblock %}</title></head>
 <body>
 <div id="content">
   {% block content%}
       <h1> Page title </h1>
       <p> H2O template inheritance is a powerful tool </p> 
   {% endblock %}
 </div>

 <div id="sidebar">
   {% block sidebar %}{% endblock %}
 </div>
 </body>
</html>

As you can see, the base template is a typical web page using a two column layout, we defined two blocks (content, sidebar) and HTML code common across all your page.

page.html - to define a template specific of a page.

{% extends 'base.html' %}

{% block content %}
    <h1> extended page </h1>
    <p> Body of extended page</p>
{% endblock %}

{% block sidebar %}
    Sidebar contains use links.
{% endblock %}

The page.html extends base.html, now you will be able to override any block previously defined.

There is a very good article about template inheritance in Django, in area of template inheritance h2o work exactly the same way.

Power of inheritance is a very good blog post explaining inheritance

Tips

if you found you have a lot of common element inside the template, it may be a good idea to put that portion of template in side a block in a base template.
block gives you a hook, especially useful they are useful for javascript, css too
When defining a block use a short and distinctive name

Configuration

There are a range of option to set up the template system the way you want it.

<?php
    $h2o = new H2o('template.tpl', array(
        [option_name] => [option_value]
    ));
?>

loader

name of loader or a instance of H2o_Loader

Use file loader [default]

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('loader'=>'file');

Advance setup $loader ); ?>

Use dictionary loader

You may want to load template from other resource than file then this will be your friend. h2o use dict_loader() for testing.

<?php
    $loader = dict_loader(array(
        "index.html" => 'Hello {{ person }}'
    ));
    $template = new H2o('index.html', array('loader' => $loader'));
?>

searchpath

default: this will be the base path of your template

h2o use this path to load additional templates and extensions.

You can either explicity set the search path

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('searchpath' => '/sites/common_templates'));

or It will try to find the searchpath for you

$template = new H2o('/sites/common_templates/index.html');

cache

define type of caching engine h2o needs to use, set to false to disable caching, you can read more about performance and caching in following sections

use file cache [default]

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache'=>'file'));

use apc cache

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache'=>'apc'));

use memcache cache

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache'=>'memcache'));

disable caching

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache'=>false));

cache_dir

When file cache is used, you can define where you want templates to be cached.

it will put cached template in same location as that template

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache_dir'=>'/tmp/cached_templates'));

cache_ttl

how long template cache will be lived (defaults: 1 hour), template fregment cache that is bundled in cache extension will use this as default ttl value.

$template = new H2o('index.html', array('cache_ttl' => 3600));

Performance and Caching

Caching can increase performance since it skips step of inefficient template parsing, H2o caches the template objects(internal data structure of a template) and bundled multiple caching backend includes File, APC and memcache.

File cache

By default h2o uses file cache to store template objects, change h2o option cache_dir to where you want to store template cache (ie: /tmp).

<?php
    $template = new H2o('homepage.tpl', array(
        'cache' => 'file',
        'cache_dir' => '/tmp'
    ));
?>

APC cache

APC is a opt-code cache php extension that also provides a robust object cache, and the performance is generally 10-30% faster than file caching.

<?php
    $template = new h2o('homepage.tpl', array('cache' => 'apc'));
?>

Memcache

currently not implemented

Extending H2o

Known issues

Realistically these are very very rare cases, so don't let it stop you getting your foot wet.

{{ block.super }} doesn't work with very deep inheritance so if {{ block.super }} invokes another {{ block.super }} it won't work just yet.
If conditions doesn't support multiple expression or math yet, {% if something > 3 or something < 2 %} or {% if something + else > 12 %} and i don't think i plan to implement them that kind of force you to construct a better data api any way.

Contributors

jlogsdon - major refactoring (wip) and bug fixes
cyberklin - Added filter support for any context resolve
idlesign - Added if_changed tag support
metropolis - improve test coverage
plus many others

Credit

There are concepts or ideas burrowed from following projects, Very early version of h2o was based on the code base of Ptemplates so thanks to Armin Ronacher.

Django template - Django web development framework.
Ptemplates - Armin Ronacher's pet project for a django port in PHP.
Jinja - Django inspired template in Python.

The MIT License

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

ciceroverneck/h2o-php