What is .tpl files? php, web design

Question

A man wants me to redesign a site run in PHP (VideoCMS). But when I asked him to send me the source he has given me *.tpl files instead of *.php. There is some code inside t

Answer 1

Those look like Smarty templates. There should be some additional PHP scripts which actually instantiate the Smarty engine and give it the data it can use for the replaceable elements.

Answer 2

Other possibilities for .tpl: HTML::SimpleTemplate, example:

Hello $name

, and Template Toolkit, example:

Hello [% world %]!

Answer 3

The files are using some sort of template engine in which curly braces indicate variables being generated by that templating engine, the files creating such variables must be present elsewhere with the more or less same name as the tpl file name. Here are some of templates engine mostly used.

Smarty

Savant

Tinybutstrong

etc

With smarty being widely used.

Answer 4

You have to learn Smarty syntax, that's a template system.