A friend of mine and I were IMing the other day when the topic of the CodeIgniter Template Parsing library came up. He had come up with a core extension that made the library a little more appealing.

OK. At this point I have to admit I have never even thought about using the Template Parsing library until this point. Even though I have been using CI for over 2 years now, there are still libraries that I helpers and now drivers that I haven’t delved into. CI is a pretty lightweight and powerful framework with great doc. There is really no good reason why I haven’t fully explored its power except to say that I am a bit lazy and haven’t really found a need to.

So anyway, on with the story.

I started exploring this library a bit. After exploring the doc, I couldn’t imagine why I would want to implement this. But I wanted to be able to discuss it intelligently so I set out to do just that.

So here are some notes I took represented as a pros/cons list:

Pros:

• Separation: Previously I was keeping all of my template views in a subdirectory of the views folder. This allowed me to move my template views out into their own space.
• Packaging: I have always included a “theme” config value that allowed me to change the theme on the fly. However, up until this point I have never been able to really package all theme files together. Moving the template views out allowed me to put all of my template related css, js, images, fonts, views, etc together in a theme directory.

 Cons:

• No Pros for Actual Template Parser: The above pros aren’t actually for the Template Parsing library. They are for the extensions of the core files and hooks that I’ll talk about next.
• Extending the Core: In order to get this to work the way we wanted it to (views outside of the main CI view directory) we had to extend the MY_Loader.php class to add view paths to the CI array. I’ll attach my version of the code below.
• Enabling Hooks: I wanted to still be able to call a default theme from the config file. I also didn’t want to have to load it in every controller. So what I wanted to do was pull the config value and load it in the MY_Loader.php constructor. Unfortunately, the config values haven’t been loaded at the time of the class construction. So the only way to easily load the default theme was to create a load function and call if from a hook, something I’ve never had to do before.
• Template Parsing is Stupid: Sorry. Had to say what everyone was thinking. It is slower. It is just as ugly. And it is added complexity. I can’t think of one reason to use it.

The Result

I guess it’s up to you. I actually think I’ll keep the core hack and hook to pull out the templates, but there is no way I’m using the Template Parsing library.

Code to Make it Work:

MY_Loader.php

<!--?php </p-->

class MY_Loader extends CI_Loader
{

public function set_default_theme()
{
$this-&gt;_ci_view_paths[FCPATH . 'theme/'.config_item('theme').'/'] = TRUE;
}

public function theme($strTheme)
{
$this-&gt;_ci_view_paths[FCPATH . 'theme/'.$strTheme.'/'] = TRUE;
}
}

post_controller_constructor.php

<!--?php </p-->

class post_controller_constructor
{
public function __construct()
{
log_message('debug', 'Hook \'post_controller_constructor\' Class Initialized');
}

public function set_default_theme()
{
$ci =&amp; get_instance();
$ci-&gt;load-&gt;set_default_theme();
log_message('debug', 'Default Theme \''.config_item('theme').'\' Enabled');
}
}