From the ThinkingPHP blog today, Felix Geisendorfer has shared some of his experience to help those CakePHP users out there that are looking at doing more templating to their applications than just the normal index changes.

One of the things I don't see getting to much coverage is how to create good templates when working with CakePHP. Since those are written in plain PHP, this does not apply to CakePHP only. So I'm sure many people have already developed their own style that they are comfortable with and I don't ask for them to change it. However, maybe some people new to the framework / language can benifit by taking a look at the one I'm using.

He covers a few different topics:

PHP tags
• Conditions
• Loops
• the linebreak issue
• avoiding multi-line statements
• Creating Zebra striped table rows

The code included on some of the points (not the multi-line or the PHP tags items) is simple and is summed up in less than six lines.