DevShed looks at another in their series of design patterns with this new article - a look at one of the simpler, more popular methods, the Template pattern.

A template class is a base class with some special abilities. First, it concretely implements one or more algorithms; second, it can determine which subclasses should use these algorithms. This article is the first part of a two-part series that introduces you to the basic concepts of this design pattern.

They create two simple classes that interface with MySQL to grab the template data from the database. On top of this, they build out a version of teh Template class, a set of methods to grab the formatted rows and return them back to the script. Finally, they use these results with a few helper classes (one for paragraphs, one for div tags) and create an example that outputs the formatted database information.