Templates

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When PHP was created 20 years ago, developers loved its simplicity and how well it blended HTML and dynamic code. But as time passed, other template languages - like Twig - were created to make templating even better.

Best Practice

Use Twig templating format for your templates.

Generally speaking, PHP templates are much more verbose than Twig templates because they lack native support for lots of modern features needed by templates, like inheritance, automatic escaping and named arguments for filters and functions.

Twig is the default templating format in Symfony and has the largest community support of all non-PHP template engines (it's used in high profile projects such as Drupal 8).

In addition, Twig is the only template format with guaranteed support in Symfony 3.0. As a matter of fact, PHP may be removed from the officially supported template engines.

Template Locations

Best Practice

Store all your application's templates in app/Resources/views/ directory.

Traditionally, Symfony developers stored the application templates in the Resources/views/ directory of each bundle. Then they used Twig namespaces to refer to them (e.g. @AcmeDemo/Default/index.html.twig).

But for the templates used in your application, it's much more convenient to store them in the app/Resources/views/ directory. For starters, this drastically simplifies their logical names:

Templates Stored inside Bundles Templates Stored in app/
@AcmeDemo/index.html.twig index.html.twig
@AcmeDemo/Default/index.html.twig default/index.html.twig
@AcmeDemo/Default/subdir/index.html.twig default/subdir/index.html.twig

Another advantage is that centralizing your templates simplifies the work of your designers. They don't need to look for templates in lots of directories scattered through lots of bundles.

Best Practice

Use lowercase snake_case for directory and template names.

Best Practice

Use a prefixed underscore for partial templates in template names.

You often want to reuse template code using the include function to avoid redundant code. To determine those partials in the filesystem you should prefix partials and any other template without HTML body or extends tag with a single underscore.

Twig Extensions

Best Practice

Define your Twig extensions in the AppBundle/Twig/ directory. Your application will automatically detect them and configure them.

Our application needs a custom md2html Twig filter so that we can transform the Markdown contents of each post into HTML.

To do this, first, install the excellent Parsedown Markdown parser as a new dependency of the project:

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$ composer require erusev/parsedown

Then, create a new Markdown class that will be used later by the Twig extension. It just needs to define one single method to transform Markdown content into HTML:

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namespace AppBundle\Utils;

class Markdown
{
    private $parser;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->parser = new \Parsedown();
    }

    public function toHtml($text)
    {
        return $this->parser->text($text);
    }
}

Next, create a new Twig extension and define a new filter called md2html using the Twig\TwigFilter class. Inject the newly defined Markdown class in the constructor of the Twig extension:

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namespace AppBundle\Twig;

use AppBundle\Utils\Markdown;
use Twig\Extension\AbstractExtension;
use Twig\TwigFilter;

class AppExtension extends AbstractExtension
{
    private $parser;

    public function __construct(Markdown $parser)
    {
        $this->parser = $parser;
    }

    public function getFilters()
    {
        return [
            new TwigFilter(
                'md2html',
                [$this, 'markdownToHtml'],
                ['is_safe' => ['html'], 'pre_escape' => 'html']
            ),
        ];
    }

    public function markdownToHtml($content)
    {
        return $this->parser->toHtml($content);
    }

    public function getName()
    {
        return 'app_extension';
    }
}

And that's it!

If you're using the default services.yml configuration, you're done! Symfony will automatically know about your new service and tag it to be used as a Twig extension.

Next: Forms

This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
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