README

Plate

A lightweight PHP templating engine inspired by Laravel's Blade.

Features

• Simple, expressive syntax with {{ }} delimiters
• Automatic output escaping for security
• Conditional rendering with if, elif, and else
• Loop support with each
• Raw PHP execution within templates
• Compiles to plain PHP for optimal performance

Requirements

• PHP >= 8.4

Installation

composer require leonickl/plate

Usage

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use LeoNickl\Plate\Plate;

// Compile a .plate file to PHP code
$phpCode = Plate::file('view.plate');

// Cast to string to get the compiled PHP
echo (string) $phpCode;

Template Syntax

Printing Values

{{ "hello" }}              // Escaped output
{{ % $html }}              // Unescaped output
{{ "hello", "world" }}     // Multiple expressions (joined with space)

Execute PHP statement

{{ :$var = "test" }}       // Execute PHP without printing

Conditionals

{{ if: $condition }}
    <p>Yes!</p>
{{ elif: $other }}
    <p>Maybe!</p>
{{ else: }}
    <p>No!</p>
{{ if; }}

Loops

{{ each: $items as $item }}
    <p>{{ $item }}</p>
{{ each; }}

Import Components

{{ plug: 'nav' }}
{{ plug: 'person', data: $person }}

In order for this to work, you need to define this function and adjust it to your environment:

function plug_plate(string $file, mixed ...$params): string
{
    return view($file, $params); // or however you import your views
}

Example

See example.plate for a complete example. Run it with:

php index.php | php

This compiles the template and executes the resulting PHP.

Syntax Highlighting

Available for VSCode leonickl/plate-vscode