Modifying Templates Using DOMDocument In PHP

21
Jul/092

Modifying Templates Using DOMDocument In PHP

In the previous post, Generating (X)HTML Documents Using DOMDocument In PHP, we explored the PHP DOMDocument class by generating an (X)HTML page completely within PHP. Now, we'll look at a more practical application that involves modifying an existing template. The template gives us a good starting point so we can focus on generating only the dynamic parts of the page.

So here is the template we will be modifying. It is identical to the page we generated, except that the title and content are removed. We will insert a title and content with PHP.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title></title>
<link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
  <div id="header"><img src="header.gif" alt="Header" width="400" height="100" /></div>
  <div id="nav">
    <ul>
      <li><a href="index.php">Home</a></li>
      <li><a href="download.php">Download</a></li>
      <li><a href="features.php">Features</a></li>
      <li><a href="about.php">About</a></li>
    </ul>
  </div>
  <div id="content"></div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Now for the code. First, we need to load the template document, called template.htm, with the DOMDocument::loadHTMLFile method.

<?php
// Load the template file into a new DOMDocument
$document = new DOMDocument();
$document->loadHTMLFile('template.htm');

Here we create the title text and insert it into the title tag. We grab the first "title" element and append the text node.

6
7
8

// Set the page title
$title = $document->createTextNode('Page Title');
$document->getElementsByTagName('title')->item(0)->appendChild($title);

Find the "content" div so we can add our content:

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// Access the content div
$content = $document->getElementById('content');

Here is where we generate the content:

// Insert actual page content into content div
$h1 = $document->createElement('h1', 'DOMDocument Template');
$content->appendChild($h1);
 
$p = $document->createElement('p');
$text = $document->createTextNode('This template was modified using PHP\'s ');
$p->appendChild($text);
$text = $document->createElement('strong', 'DOMDocument');
$p->appendChild($text);
$text = $document->createTextNode(' class!');
$p->appendChild($text);
$content->appendChild($p);

Now we output the modified document:

// Output document
$document->formatOutput = true;
echo $document->saveXML();
?>

Check out the demo page...

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Author: Steve

Steve is the owner of UlraMega Tech. He is a freelance Web designer and developer who specializes in PHP and AJAX development.

Tagged as: DOM, PHP, XHTML

2 Comments

« Using MySQL Prepared Statements in PHP

Generating (X)HTML Documents Using DOMDocument In PHP »

Comments (2) Trackbacks (2) ( subscribe to comments on this post )

sunjester
August 7th, 2009

didn’t work at all man…. or maybe my browser doesn’t support that version of the xml document.

( REPLY )
- UltraMega
  August 7th, 2009
  
  If you are referring to the demo, you should just see the markup as text. That’s intentional so you see the actual code generated.
  
  ( REPLY )