Understanding the Templating Concept

Quick reference

• 00:04 We've created our math flash card app and it's looking pretty good.
• 00:07 In this video I want to talk about something called templating.
• 00:10 And we've already sort of touched on this earlier when we talked about include and
• 00:15 require.
• 00:15 Those are the main tools we'll use for templating.
• 00:18 But, right now I just want to sort of talk about the concept of it,
• 00:21 what it's for, why we care, and what we're gonna do with it.
• 00:24 So, PHP is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and
• 00:29 it's not because it's particularly great,
• 00:31 but I think you've already found that it's pretty easy to use.
• 00:34 The reason why it's so popular is because of WordPress and
• 00:37 you've probably heard of WordPress.
• 00:39 WordPress is a content management software.
• 00:43 You can go to wordpress.org, not to be confused with wordpress.com,
• 00:48 the third party hosted blog site.
• 00:50 Wordpress.org is the actual WordPress itself.
• 00:53 You can download this for free.
• 00:55 You can install it on a web server, and run it in your own WordPress blog.
• 00:58 Well, WordPress was built with PHP.
• 01:01 It is completely and totally built with PHP.
• 01:05 And one of the reasons why it's so popular is all this templating.
• 01:08 It's just a WordPress blog is broken up into all the different templates with PHP,
• 01:14 and just makes it very, very easy to create a content management system.
• 01:18 Well, we're not going to be creating a whole content management system, but
• 01:21 the idea of templating,
• 01:22 the concept, I sort of want to talk about just a little bit.
• 01:25 And it's not that difficult to wrap your brains around and
• 01:28 it makes things much, much easier.
• 01:30 So what would we do if we wanted to template this thing out?
• 01:33 Well, we have these four pages right and they all sort of look the same.
• 01:37 They are the same sort of look to them, the same layout,
• 01:40 they have the same set of links at the top here.
• 01:43 They all have these numbers, they have the same form.
• 01:47 We don't have anything down here as a footer, but let's go ahead and create one.
• 01:50 Say if we wanted our index page,
• 01:53 let's just come back here real quick and create some line breaks.
• 01:59 Let's go copyright c and let's throw
• 02:04 in a date like we already know how to do.
• 02:13 All rights reserved.
• 02:15 Okay, so if we save this, come back here, and hit Reload,
• 02:18 we have this nice little copyright statement at the bottom here.
• 02:22 Well, what if we wanted that on all of these pages?
• 02:24 Well, we could just copy and paste that line of code.
• 02:26 But we might wanna change that later on.
• 02:29 Same thing with these links, we might wanna add an exponent or
• 02:33 a modulus flash card, or some other sort of flash card.
• 02:36 And instead of then fixing every single page, going back and
• 02:40 changing all the links on all the pages,
• 02:42 or changing the copyright notice on all of the pages, look at that.
• 02:46 Our date did not show up.
• 02:48 Must have done that wrong.
• 02:50 Forgot to echo.
• 02:53 There we go.
• 02:54 So anyway, as I was saying, it's a good idea to template these things out.
• 02:58 In the next video we're gonna kind of start to template this out.
• 03:01 Now, this is a very basic app.
• 03:02 There's not a whole lot of templating to do,
• 03:05 but it's a good idea to get in the habit of whenever you build an app,
• 03:08 whenever you create anything, think in your mind how you can template it out how
• 03:12 you can make it easier over all with the building process.
• 03:15 So, in the next video we will start templating this thing out.

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