Hernani Cerqueira has posted a quick introduction to using XSLT (an XML-based markup for styling XML documents) as a templating engine for PHP.

It is probably safe to assume that everyone by now has seen the PHP 5 release announcements or at least have heard that XML support has been given a complete overhaul. Although I am still surprised with those I talk to who are still developing with PHP 4 and actively working with XML, rather than upgrading to PHP 5 to use the new XML tool sets, I guess it might be a bit scary to think about such an upgrade. Both ext/xslt and ext/domxml have been removed from the core PHP distribution and replaced with completely new extensions, resulting in the need to review and typically re-write all older code relying on either of those extensions in order to upgrade.

p. A few months ago, apress released an expansive tome by Rob Richards’ titled “Pro PHP XML and Web Services”. They were kind enough to send me a copy for review. Click on inside and let’s chat about it for a while.

p. With HTML, developers knew where they stood: design, content, and styling were all in one place. However, the new (and superior) trend is towards keeping various parts of data separate: XML stores content, CSS stores styling, and XHTML stores layout.

p. Using the new system, with content and layout clearly split, it is suddenly much easier to manipulate content without affecting layout. This is where XSLT comes in: it provides a way to process and output the data stored in an XML document based upon your processing instructions.

Presenting content is one of the more time consuming and challenging tasks when building a web site. This tutorial looks at taking an XML document and dynamically transforming it into HTML using PHP and XSL. As a practical example, this tutorial is available as XML as well as the XSL stylesheet which transforms it into Zend.com’s common tutorial layout.



The goal of this tutorial is to demonstrate how to use PHP and XSL to transform an XML document into HTML.