Building Page Templates with PHP Fat-Free
If you were building a database which contained a great deal of information your favorite video games then it certainly won’t make any sense to create one static page for each game. Instead, you’ll want to create a page template which is dynamically updated based on the user’s request to learn more about a particular game. You can pass variables from the route function into your page like this:
F3::route('GET /game',
function() {
F3::set('title', 'Super Mario Brothers');
F3::set('publisher', 'Nintendo');
F3::set('year', '1985');
echo F3::serve("pages/game.html");
}
);The game.html file must include placeholders for each variable. For instance, you could output each of the variables defined within the route function by adding the following text to game.html:
{@title} was created by {@publisher} in {@year}.With both pieces in place, requesting /game to the browser will result in the following string being output to the browser:
Super Mario Brothers was created by Nintendo in 1985. Integrating a MySQL Database with PHP Fat-Free
In order to make the video game website fully dynamic you’ll need to retrieve the data from your database. This is incredibly easy to do using Fat-Free. The following example uses a dynamic title slug passed via the route to query a MySQL database table. All of this should be quite straightforward except for the AUTOLOAD-related call. This call is responsible for identifying the location of the sqldb plugin which is packaged with the Fat-Free download. If you look inside this directory you’ll find a list of 20 different plugins which you can use to enhance your website’s capabilities.
<!--p
require_once 'F3/F3.php';
F3::route('GET /game/@slug',
function() {
F3::set('AUTOLOAD','/home/wjgilmore/Downloads/fatfree-1.4.4/autoload/');
F3::set('DB',
array(
'dsn-->'mysql:host=localhost;port=3306;dbname=fat_games',
'user'=>'root',
'password'=>'jason'
)
);
$slug = F3::scrub(F3::get('PARAMS["slug"]'));
F3::sql("SELECT title, publisher, released FROM games WHERE slug='$slug'");
echo F3::serve("pages/game.html");
}
);
F3::run();The game.html template is then modified to iterate over any records returned from the query, which in the case of this particular example is exactly one:
{@game.title} was created by {@game.publisher} in {@game.released}.Conclusion
Fat-Free provides developers with an incredibly rich set of functionality while staying true to its goal of keeping a trim waistline. If you’re looking for a no-nonsense solution to building dynamic websites fast, Fat-Free is well worth a look.
