templating system with zf2? - doctrine-orm

Question

we are planing to create a CMS with zf2 and doctrine orm .
actually we are concern about our cms templating
we want our system works with several templates and easily change between themes via admin
and creating a new templates should be easy for end-users developers
we want an advice or suggest for how to build templating system that :
there is a core module and there a lot sub modules with their own phtml
so where to store theme1 phtml and where to store theme2 phtmls ...
any suggest or advice please
thanks

Answer 1

I encourage you to take a look at Twig, its the best template engine I have seen so far :) It does take some time to learn Twig syntax, but its well worthy if you look at what you get :)
I cant yet write comments, so I wrote this as an answare.
Hope this helps. Trust me, the Twig is the way to go. Joust look at his documentation for more specific details how to use it!
EDIT:
The problem you are trying to solve has nothing to do with template engine. You can do that with any template engine. You can do it even with plain PHP if you want.
I built web application where users can register, get their own sub domain, and there they can build their webpage. Change theme, edit text, add pages. Simple CMS functionality.
The easiest way to do this is to have themes folder, where you would store themes, like this:
themes/
- themeBlue
- css/
- images/
- js/
- html or views/
- themeRose
...
Now this is where you would place all your themes, every theme has its own folder with images, css, js files...
And then you would have users, and every user would be able to choose and change theme.
That information would be stored in database. You need to store that user Jack is using themeBlue. You can do that as you want. You can event put this in users table like user_theme column.
Now when someone visits site, you first query database to see what theme is that user or creator of web using. And then you load all that files from current theme folder. And populate html files with data stored in database like in any other CMS.
This is the simplest implementation. You could for example, store css and html files in database :)
Hope this answers your question.
Good luck with that, I almost gone mad building my system :) I ended up with writing my own PHP MVC Framework joust to accomplish what I wanted.

Answer 2

if you activate another module in the application.config.php which has the same views and layouts (same folder structure and filenames) it's viewscripts and layouts will automatically be used when it's loaded after your core module.
so you could simply make your application.config.php dynamic to load the active template module which only contains the view folder. this would be a simple and effective solution without any other libraries.
additionally you can use an asset manager like assetic to also provide images, css etc. inside of your (template-)modules. (have a look at zf2-assetic-module, I wrote my own assetize-module based on assetic to fit my needs...)

Answer 3

Sina,
I do this in my Application->Module.php onBootstrap
$ss = $serviceManager->get('application_settings_service');
$settings = $ss->loadSettings();
$serviceManager->get('translator');
$templatePathResolver = $serviceManager->get('Zend\View\Resolver\TemplatePathStack');
$templatePathResolver->setPaths(array(__DIR__ . '/view/'.$settings['theme'])); // here is your skin name
$viewModel = $application->getMvcEvent()->getViewModel();
$viewModel->themeurl = 'theme/'.$settings['theme'].'/';
In this situation I have this structure in my view folder
view/
default/
application/
error/
layout/
zfcuser/
red/
application/
error/
layout/
zfcuser/
The $viewmodel above injects a variable into the layout for the themeurl in the public_html folder /theme/red/ with all assets for red
Access in layout.phtml -> themeurl;?> in a viewscript layout()->themeurl;?>
I am still working out my Dynamic Views. Right now I have a BaseController and all my ActionControllers extend it. It has a render() function that builds the required views but not sure its going to be scalable hoping to try some placeholder ideas.
application_settings_service is a Settings Service that gets settings for whatever domain was used to call the system and builds an array accessible via any service aware part of the site. Thats a whole different post and it may or may not rub MVC peeps the wrong way
I know your question is marked answered just thought I would share
Eric