<?php echo $this->get('title') ?>

The Component in Five Minutes ============================= The Symfony Templating component provides all the tools needed to build any kind of template system. It is a thin and flexible layer on top of PHP that provides simple but powerful features, covering templating common needs. It is centered around a main class, `sfTemplateEngine`, which provides the features that are common to all templating systems (inclusions, template inheritance, slots, helpers, ...), and three main sub-components: template loaders, template renderers, and template helpers. >**TIP** >Like other symfony components, the templating component can use >autoloading: > > [php] > require_once '/path/to/sfTemplateAutoloader.php'; > sfTemplateAutoloader::register(); If you don't have time to read the full documentation, which you should read anyway later on, the following code can get you started right away: [php] require_once '/path/to/sfTemplateAutoloader.php'; sfTemplateAutoloader::register(); $loader = new sfTemplateLoaderFilesystem(dirname(__FILE__).'/templates/%name%.php'); $engine = new sfTemplateEngine($loader); echo $engine->render('index', array('name' => 'Fabien')); The previous code will render a template named `index`, which should exist in the `dirname(__FILE__).'/templates/'` directory. The templating component makes no assumption on where to find templates and how to render them. The "where" is taken care of by the **template loader**. The built-in `sfTemplateLoaderFilesystem` class, used in the above code snippet, knows how to load templates from the filesystem. The "how" is taken care of by the **template renderer**. The built-in `sfTemplateRendererPhp` class knows how to render plain PHP templates. It is always implicitly registered. The `index` template is a plain PHP file which has access to several convenient methods: [php] extend('layout') ?> set('title', 'My Page Title') ?> Hello Within a template, you can access template parameters like local variables, and the `$this` object refers to the template engine instance, which provides useful methods for templates. For instance, the `extend()` method tells the engine that the template should be decorated by the `layout` template. The layout template reads as follows: [php] <?php echo $this->get('title') ?> get('content') ?> The `get()` and `set()` methods allows the definition of named snippets of HTML (called **slots**) that can be used in another template or layout later on (like the `title` one). The same mechanism is also used by the templating layout system, where `content` represents the content of the child template. Keep reading to learn more about the above code, and much more.