I think the benefit might come when you can add additional methods for other templates types, like Template::renderSmarty() where both render and renderSmarty might share some logic that would be best encapsulated by a private method on the Template class.

But you’re right. An autoloaded static class with 1 static method and no properties is essentially a global function.

On another note, a class that only has one static method does not feel like it deserves to be a class since being a class gives it no advantages. Why not just make it a function (template_render)?

http://sandeep.shetty.in/2009/04/procedural-programming-is-not-bad-thing.html

Template::render('user/details', $user);

I find this level of granularity helps encourage the maintenance of a single canonical template for each type of content.

<? if(!empty($photos)) { ?>
<ul class="objs photos">
    <? foreach($photos as $photo) { ?>
    <li><?=Template::render('photo/thumb', $photo)?></li>
    <? } ?>
</ul>
<? } ?>

or

<? if(!empty($user->profile_photo)) { ?>
<?=Template::render('photo/thumb', $user->profile_photo)?>
<? } ?>

I find there’s a balance to be struck between autonomy and completeness. I find that methods like renderAll tend to make me do things like put <li></li> inside a template which really only wants to render a photo thumbnail. Adding <li></li> to photo/thumbnail ties the template to its context, violating its autonomy, keeping me from using it elsewhere. Drawing precise boundaries to keep the code dry requires granular templates. Unless renderAll() took some additional arguments like $before and $after for wrapping output of individual items, but that seems to open a whole can of worms to solve a problem that granular templates solves already.

One, should there be a check for an object passed in instead of an array? A common case in Recess is going to be passing an Object.

Two, supposing you’re going to render a list of objects/arrays, would it be worth handling this case in the render? Or an alternative render like renderAll? Differences:

$users = array( 
    array( 'name' => 'A', 'userid' => 1 ), 
    array( 'name' => 'B', 'userid' => 2 ) 
);
 
foreach ($users as $user) {
  Template::render('user/details', $user);
}

vs.

Template::render('user/details', $users);

vs.

Template::renderAll('user/details', $users);

The upside to keeping the loop within Template’s logic instead of the view’s logic is that the performance will be much better.

Great post. I’ve just taken a stab at Layouts (a close relative to Templates) and will be using your technique for Templates.

One question I have regarding your example is if in greeting.tpl.php file, your manually declarations of $name = $d['name'], and $userid are a best practice? Or if there is a reason for doing this over using PHP’s extract()?

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.extract.php

You could change your Template.class.php to:

// ...
ob_start();
extract($d);
include($file);
// ...

And then remove the chunk of PHP at the top of your template and arrive at the same functionality.

Good stuff!