PHPMaster.com has started up a new series today with the first part of a set of tutorials looking at design patterns that can be used in the handling of your views to make them more effective and easier to maintain.

To overcome your skepticism [of an easy to use, flexible view system], in this two-part tutorial I’ll show you how to implement from scratch a couple of customizable view handling modules by sinking our teeth into the goodies of the Composite and Decorator patterns.

He starts off by creating a foundation to work from - a basic View class that takes in data, allows for the setting of a template and combines it all together when "render()" is called. He then takes this example and applies the Composite pattern and creates interfaces for the template, container and view, implements them and shows how to attach views to other views. Each of these views is then rendered when the main "render()" method is called and the output is appended.