PHP simple template loader

Question

This is not really a question but I'd like to obtain some opinions about this simple class. For an old project I had the necessity to load some php template files that includes some foreach() and for() loops and other variables loaded from a database. I was start thinking how to obtain this using a templating class and this is what I wrote to achieve the objective, I've reworked a templating class that works well with html and php files that doesn't need to load data from variables. I know that I can also use simply the include, require or include_once and require_once but writing a reusable class was the solution that seemed to me more reliable. Can this class to be considered useful? Is it possible to improve it by using magic methods like __set() and __get() to output the desired data to a loop? In the usage example I will not post the $data variable that is an array of data loaded from database, this choiche is because I don't want to write a long post.

<?php

class Template{

    private $tpl;
    private $fileName;
    private $templatePath;

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

    public function loadTemplate(string $tpl){
        $this->fileName = basename($tpl.'.php');
        if(file_exists($this->templatePath.'/'.$this->fileName)){
             return $this->templatePath.'/'.$this->fileName;
        } else {
            throw new Exception('Template not found.');
        }
    }

}

?>

Usage example:

<?php

require_once 'Template.class.php';
//$data = array(); this array comes from a db
//$results = array(); this is an handmade array
$template = new Template('path/to/template/file');

include($template->loadTemplate('demo'));
?>

Template file that is loaded

          <div class="wrapper">
            <?php for($i = 0; $i < count($data); $i++): ?>
              <span><small class="text-uppercase"><?php echo $data[$i]['h']; ?></small>
              <small>&nbsp;-&nbsp;</small>
              <small class="text-uppercase"><?php echo $data[$i]['a']; ?></small>
              <p><?php echo $results[mt_rand(1,12)]; ?></p></span>
            <?php endfor;?>

          </div>

Answer 1

This is not a template class at all, but sort of a wrapper for file_exists() function. It does nothing of the templating business but just gets you a filename.

To make it a template class,

• make it accept an array with all data used in the template
• add a render() function that will extract data array into separate variables and then include the template file.
• add some sort of auto-escaping feature (like going through the data array recursively and escaping all scalar values)
• a possibility to return the rendered HTML instead of outputting it
• add some facility to call a "master" template that will add the common site design to the certain page's template.

So a usage example would be

require_once 'Template.class.php';
$data = [
    'data' => $data,
    'results' => $results,
];
$template = new Template('path/to/template/file');
$template->render($data);

Quite off topic but consider a more tidy syntax for your template.

      <div class="wrapper">
        <?php foreach($data as $row): ?>
          <span><small class="text-uppercase"><?= $row['h'] ?></small>
          <small>&nbsp;-&nbsp;</small>
          <small class="text-uppercase"><?= $row['a'] ?></small>
          <p><?= $results[mt_rand(1,12)] ?></p></span>
        <?php endforeach ?>
      </div>