BareUI

BareUI is a simple, lightweight, and barebones templating engine focused on speed, speed, and more speed! Most templating engines out there ship with a nice syntax, handy ways to use expressions, layouts and code blocks, however, there's one problem: they are slow!

BareUI takes advantage of PHP's innate templating capabilities so it's syntax is PHP's syntax. It lacks all the syntactic sugar added in other engines like blade, but it also requires no compiling, no caching, just speed!

New to template engines?

Learn how using a template engine can improve your view files with "dumb" templates that are easy to read and understand in this video by LaraCasts.

Setting Up

You can install BareUI through the Leaf CLI:

Leaf CLIComposer

bash

leaf install bareui

bash

composer require leafs/bareui

Once installed, BareUI will be available in your Leaf app on the template() method. This makes it easy to use BareUI from anywhere in your app.

php

app()->template()->render('welcome');

Configuring BareUI

BareUI doesn't require any real configuration to work, but you need to tell it where to look for your templates. You can do this using the config() method. If you are using Leaf MVC, this has already been done for you in the config/view.php file, so you can skip this step.

php

app()->template()->config('path', './views');

This will tell BareUI to look for templates in the views directory in your project. Now that BareUI knows where to look for templates, you can start writing your templates.

Writing Templates

BareUI templates are regular PHP files, so you can create your templates using PHP without learning any new syntax or special language. These template files have a .view.php extension, making it easy to identify them separately from other files in your project. This approach keeps things simple and familiar for PHP developers.

welcome.view.php

html

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <title>Document</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    Hello World
  </body>
</html>

Rendering Templates

Once you have your template, you can render it using the render method. This method takes in the name of the template to render and an array of data to pass to the template.

php

echo app()->template()->render('welcome');

When rendering a template, you don't need to include the .view.php extension in the template name. BareUI automatically adds it for you when it looks for the template file. So, you only need to pass the name of the template without the extension, and BareUI will handle the rest!

Passing Data to Templates

Passing data into a template file means sending information from your main code to a template so it can be displayed or used there. Template files are pretty dumb on their own; they don't know anything about the outside world. They just display whatever data you pass to them.

Let's look at a simple template:

welcome.view.php

blade

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Document</title>
</head>
<body>
    Hello <?php echo $name; ?>
</body>
</html>

This is an empty HTML page with a PHP tag that echoes a variable. On its own, this template doesn't do much. But when we fill in the $name variable, it will display the value of that variable on the page.

To pass data to this $name variable, you can pass an array of data as the second argument to the render() method. This array should contain the same keys as the variables you want to use in the template.

php

echo app()->template()->render('welcome', [
    'name' => 'Something',
]);

This will render the template and replace the $name variable with the value 'Something'. You can pass as many variables as you want to the template, and they will all be available in the template file. These values can be anything from strings to arrays, objects, or even functions.

app.php

php

echo app()->template()->render('products', [
    'items' => [
      ['name' => 'Item 1'],
      ['name' => 'Item 2'],
    ],
]);

And in your template file:

app.view.php

blade

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Document</title>
</head>
<body>
    <?php if (count($items) > 0) : ?>
        <ul>
            <?php foreach($items as $item) : ?>
                <li><?php echo $item['name']; ?></li>
            <?php endforeach; ?>
        </ul>
    <?php else : ?>
        <p>There are no items</p>
    <?php endif; ?>
</body>
</html>

This will render a list of items if there are any items in the array, or display a message if there are no items. You can use this approach to pass any data you want to your templates and display it however you like.

What about Security?

Lots of templating engines shun PHP's native templating capabilities because they don't encode output by default. This can lead to security vulnerabilities if you're not careful. While BareUI doesn't come with any built-in encoding, Leaf takes care of this for you. Leaf automatically encodes all data in your app to prevent XSS attacks. This means you can safely echo data in your templates without worrying about encoding it yourself.

Control Structures

BareUI supports all the control structures you'd expect in a templating engine. This includes if, else, elseif, foreach, for, and while loops. You can use these control structures to conditionally display content, loop over arrays, and more.

blade

<body>
    <?php if (count($items) > 1) : ?>
        <ul>
            <?php foreach($items as $item) : ?>
                <li><?php echo $item; ?></li>
            <?php endforeach; ?>
        </ul>

        <ul>
            <?php for($i = 0; $i < count($items); $i++) : ?>
                <li><?php echo $items[$i]; ?></li>
            <?php endfor; ?>
        </ul>
    <?php else if (count($items) === 1) : ?>
        <p>There is only one item</p>
    <?php else : ?>
        <p>There are no items</p>
    <?php endif; ?>
</body>

As you guessed, any valid PHP code can be used in BareUI templates. This means you can use any PHP function, class, or method in your templates. This makes BareUI a powerful templating engine that can handle any task you throw at it.

Sub-templates/Partials

Sub-templates are templates that are included in other templates. This allows you to break your templates into smaller, more manageable pieces that can be reused across multiple templates. This is a great way to keep your templates DRY and avoid repeating yourself.

To include a sub-template in a template, you can use the $template->render() method with the name of the sub-template you want to include.

blade

<body>
    <?php echo $template->render('partials/header'); ?>

    <h1>Welcome to my site</h1>

    <?php
      echo $template->render('partials/footer', [
          'year' => date('Y'),
      ]);
    ?>
</body>

All BareUI templates have access to the $template variable, which is an instance of the BareUI engine. Calling the render() method on this variable will include the specified sub-template in the current template.

BareUI ​

Setting Up ​

Configuring BareUI ​

Writing Templates ​

Rendering Templates ​

Passing Data to Templates ​

What about Security? ​

Control Structures ​

Sub-templates/Partials ​

BareUI

Setting Up

Configuring BareUI

Writing Templates

Rendering Templates

Passing Data to Templates

What about Security?

Control Structures

Sub-templates/Partials