Legato framework supports two main templating engine out of the box:

1. Twig and
2. Blade.

The default template engine is Twig, of course, you can easily switch to Blade or use raw PHP if you like, to change your template engine update your .env file as follow:

Default

TEMPLATE_ENGINE=twig

Using Blade

TEMPLATE_ENGINE=blade

Creating a View

Typically all views should be created inside resources/views folder, depending on the templating engine you choose you will then have to create files that correspond to that template engine for example if you choose to use Blade as your template engine then your file extension should end with .blade.php so if you're creating an about us page you might do the following:

Blade

about.blade.php

the structure will look like so

resources
|---views
|       about.blade.php

Twig

about.twig

the structure will look like so

resources
|---views
|       about.twig

Loading a view

Loading a view is very simple using the global view helper function, which accepts two arguments:

1. The name of the view or file to load and
2. Optional data array

To load a particular view file you will use the following method:

view('name');

Consider the following example showing how to load the about page from within a controller:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

class IndexController extends BaseController
{

    public function show()
    {
        view('about');
    }
}

when using blade or twig you don't need to specify the extension.

Passing Dynamic Data to the View

you can also pass data to the view like so:

<?php

namespace App\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;

class IndexController extends BaseController
{

    public function show()
    {
        $users = User::all();

        view('about', compact('users') );
    }
}

Displaying Dynamic Data in Twig View

following the example above we can now display the data in the twig view as follows:

<h1>Users</h1>
<ul>
    {% for user in users %}
        <li>{{ user.username }}: {{ user.email }}</li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>

Displaying Dynamic Data in Blade View

following the example above we can now display the data in the blade view as follows:

<h1>Users</h1>
<ul>
    @foreach($users as $user)
        <li>{{ $user->username }}: {{ $user->email  }}</li>
    @endforeach
</ul>

when using blade remember to set the correct template value in .env

Twig Global Variables

If you wish to declare variables when using twig simply add it to the file config/twig.php for example to declare a global variable called app_name we can do the following:

<?php

return [
    'twig_global' => [
        'app_name' => getenv('APP_NAME'),
    ]
];

then inside the view, we can reference it like so:

{% block title %} {{ app_name }}{% endblock %}

Registering Twig Extensions

If your application require some twig extensions then you can register them by updating the extensions array in the file config/twig.php like so:

<?php

return [
    'twig_global' => [
        'app_name' => config('APP_NAME', 'Legato Framework'),
        ...
    ],
    'extensions' => [
        'global' => \Legato\Framework\TwigGlobal::class,
        'debug' => \Twig_Extension_Debug::class,
        'somekey_irrelevant' => 'Your extension class',
        ...
    ],
];

By default the dump extension will be registered for you if you set the environment variable APP_ENV to true in your .env file