What is PHPTemplate?

PHPTemplate is one of a family of applications known as templating engines (referred to frequently in Drupal—and in this text—as "theme engines"). These applications serve a middleware function and determine the coding syntax, which will be used to create the theme. As the name implies, PHPTemplate supports the popular PHP programming language for theme creation.

PHPTemplate was built by developer Adrian Rossouw, and was created specifically for use with Drupal. PHPTemplate is the most widely supported theme engine for Drupal and is compatible with Drupal 4.6 and up. PHPTemplate is included in the default distro of the Drupal 5 series.

Your default PHPTemplate engine files are located on your server in the directory themes/engines/phptemplate; additional theme files will appear in the theme directory of each individual PHPTemplate-enabled theme.

Note

PHPTemplate files follow a naming convention: xyz.tpl.php.

For example: block.tpl.php, comment.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, page...