ob_start() Alternative for templates in PHP?

Question Updated

I am building an MVC framework, for my templates and views, I will have a main page template file and my views will be included into this template.

The only way I have seen to do this is to use output buffereing

ob_start();
include 'userProfile.php';
$content = ob_get_clean();

Is there any other way of doing this? I think output buffering is not the best on performance as it uses a lot of memory

Here is a sample controller, the $this->view->load('userProfile', $profileData); is the part that will be loaded using output biffering so that it can be included into the main template below into the $content part

view class

public function load($view,$data = null) {

    if($data) {
        $this->data = $data;
        extract($data);
    } elseif($this->data != null) {
            extract($this->data);
    }

    ob_start();
    require(APP_PATH . "Views/$view.php");
    $content = ob_get_clean();
}

controller

/**
 * Example Controller
 */
class User_Controller extends Core_Controller {



    // domain.com/user/id-53463463
    function profile($userId)
    {
        // load a Model
        $this->loadModel('profile');  
        //GET data from a Model
        $profileData = $this->profile_model->getProfile($userId);

        // load view file
        $this->view->load('userProfile', $profileData);
    }
}

main site template

<html>
<head>

</head>

<body>

<?php echo $content; ?>

</body>
</html>

Solution

Using a template system is not necessarily tied to output buffering. There are a couple of things in the example code you give that should certainly not be taken for granted:

One:

flushblocks(); // what does this do??

And two:

$s = ob_get_clean();

Why does the code capture the template output into a variable? Is it necessary to do some processing on this before outputting it? If not, you could simply lose the output buffering calls and let the output be sent to the browser immediately.