In short Yes
I use templates myself on a site I made with Kohana 3.0. I'll try to explain the basic setup of it; to use templates your controllers need to extend Controller_Template and the $template variable inside specifies what template page to load in your views folder, so I made my own master controller class that extends the controller_template class to manage which template to load; below you'll see my default template's name is simply template so it'll load template.php from my views folder if one isn't specified on my controllers.
I have a master.php master controller with a class definition of (dumbed down)
abstract class Controller_Master extends Controller_Template
{
public $template = 'template'; // Default template
public function before()
{
// Set a local template variable to what template the controller wants to use, by default 'template'
$template = $this->template;
// This is important and for abstraction, since we're extending a class and its functions we need to make sure we still execute its before(); function
// This will load the view you need from /views/template.php or /views/template2.php depending on what your controller specifies into $this->template
parent::before();
// Check which template our code/controller needs to use
if ($template == 'template')
{
$this->template->header = View::factory('template/head'); // Loads default header file from our views folder /views/template/head.php
$this->template->content = View::factory('template/index'); // Loads default index file from our views folder /views/template/index.php
$this->template->footer = View::factory('template/footer'); // Loads default footer file from our views folder /views/template/footer.php
return;
} elseif ($template == 'template2')
{
$this->template->header = View::factory('template2/head'); // Loads default header file from our views folder /views/template2/head.php
$this->template->sidebar = View::factory('template2/sidebar'); // Loads default sidebar file from our views folder /views/template2/sidebar.php
$this->template->content = View::factory('template2/index'); // Loads default index file from our views folder /views/template2/index.php
$this->template->footer = View::factory('template2/footer'); // Loads default footer file from our views folder /views/template2/footer.php
return;
}
}
}
I have a user.php user controller with a class definition of
// This is important, make sure your controllers extend your master controller class
class Controller_User extends Controller_Master
{
// In this example this user controller just needs to use the default controller
// so nothing needs to be changed on it besides extending our Controller_Master
// Example action inside the user class on how to load different content into your template instead of the default index page.
function action_login()
{
// Load the login view page from /views/template/forms/login.php
$this->template->content = View::factory('template/forms/login');
}
}
Now lets say we have a controller that needs to use a different template so lets say
you have have a photo.php photo controller with a class definition of
// This is important, make sure your controllers extend your master controller class
class Controller_Photo extends Controller_Master
{
// Since this controller needs to use a different template we extend the before() function
// to override the $template variable we created in master to use 'template2'
function before()
{
$this->template = 'template2';
}
}
/views/template.php contains something like
<body>
<div id="header">
<?= $header; ?>
</div>
<div id="content">
<?= $content; ?>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<?= $footer; ?>
</div>
</body>
/views/templat2e.php contains a different layout like
<body>
<div id="header">
<?= $header; ?>
</div>
<div id="sidebar">
<?= $sidebar; ?>
</div>
<div id="content">
<?= $content; ?>
</div>
<div id="footer">
<?= $footer; ?>
</div>
</body>
Where's $header, $sidebar, $content, and $footer are set in the master controller or overwriten by the code in your controller by $this->template->header and so forth.
Hopefully that explains enough how to work with templates in Kohana.
