WordPress templating system for custom plugins

Question

I'm creating a custom plugin which needs to display HTML with dynamically updated values.

To illustrate, here's what I want to achieve:

<h1><?php print $title; ?></h1>
<h3><?php print $subtitle; ?></h3>
<div class="description"><?php print $content; ?></div>

How can I define a template, pass some variables and get output in return from my custom plugin? I do not want to embed everything as a variable name as it's messy; going back between PHP and HTML in a middle of a function doesn't seem any cleaner either.

What is WP way of doing this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The various styles of mixing and matching HTML and PHP has always been a bear. Circumstances sometimes dictate the method you use, but many developers prefer one style or another and WordPress tends to use the style in your example.

Another option, which is a bit cleaner in my opinion is to make use of the heredoc syntax in PHP which allows for simple variable substitution. http://php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

$Output = <<< EOF
<h1>$title</h1>
<h3>$subtitle</h3>
<div class="description">$content</div>
EOF;

return $Output;

You can't do away with the PHP variables entirely, but you can make it easier to write, read, and maintain.