The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial on a "different kind of template engine" that makes use of selectors and placeholders to define templates and replace data: Transphporm. In this article they introduce you to the library and give some examples of it in action.

Many PHP template engines (Smarty, Blade, Twig…) are little more than abstracted PHP code, making it easier to write loops, if/then/else blocks, and display variables with less verbosity than vanilla PHP. These traditional template engines require the designer to have an understanding of special syntax. The template engine must also be in place and operational in order to parse data and thus completely render the final design. Nothing wrong with this.

Transphporm follows a different approach that is generally known as “template animation”. What this means is that the web designer creates the entire HTML/CSS/JS page including placeholder content such as “Lorem Ipsum”, then the template engine comes along and replaces parts of the DOM with new data before the final render.

The benefit of this kind of templating is that the designer or one creating the templates doesn't need to know anything about the templating software or a special syntax. Transphporm uses CSS-style selectors to define the replacement location and the data that should fill that spot. They give an example of a simple HTML page with plenty of markup defining the locations of the placeholders. They then show how to define a "tss" configuration, listing out all of the selectors and the content to push in as a replacement. They also talk a bit about DOM concerns, what happens if the template changes and the selector is no longer valid and how to help this with partials. Finally they look at some of the more advanced features like using arrays, working with attributes and conditional changes (among others).

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial from Vojislav Janjic about using a simple DOM parser in PHP to edit the markup even if it's not correctly W3C-formatted - the Simple HTML DOM Parser

Simple HTML DOM parser is a PHP 5+ class which helps you manipulate HTML elements. The class is not limited to valid HTML; it can also work with HTML code that did not pass W3C validation. Document objects can be found using selectors, similar to those in jQuery. You can find elements by ids, classes, tags, and much more. DOM elements can also be added, deleted or altered.

They help you get started using the parser, passing in the HTML content to be handled (either directly via a string or loading a file) and locating elements in the document either by ID, class or tag. Selectors similar to those in CSS are available. Finally, they show how to find an object and update its contents, either by adding more HTML inside or by appending a new object after it.

In a new post Fabien Potencier talks about how he took the Python lxml.cssselect component from Python, ported it over to PHP and made a library that allows you to parse XML with the handy CSS selectors rather than using XPath.

Odds are you [also] need to parse some from time to time: because you consume a web service and want to extract some information, or because you want to gather data from scraped web pages, or just because you want to write functional tests for a website.

The CssSelector tool allows you to convert a CSS selector into an XPath that can, in turn, be pushed into the XPath function of the PHP DOM XML functionality. He gives a few examples of using it for a simple "find" and for something more complex involving a SimpleXML object too.

The library can be downloaded from github here.