Using Custom Layout

Yii 2.0 General Discussions
1

In Yii 1.x you could use different layouts (column1, column2 etc.), is it possible to do this in Yii 2.0 as well (in one way or another)?

When a user is logged in on my website, on all pages a sidebar needs to be displayed.

Two options i have thought of:

  • I can check in every view file if a user is logged in and use a partial render to render the sidebar, but that seems very inefficient.

  • I already created my own View class (extending the yii\web\View class). I can create a function here which will check if a user is logged in, and if so, partial render the sidebar view. But i still have to call this function in every view file then.

Or is there another handy way to do this?

2

Sure.

See $layout property of yii\base\Controller.

Also you can set different layouts for modules etc.

How about creating a widget?

3

Thanks, can i also use (like in Yii 1.x) something like beginContent() and endContent(), so i can use my ‘main’ layout as the base for another layout?

What i uses in Yii 1.x:


<?php $this->beginContent('//layouts/main'); ?>

<div id="content">

	<?php echo $content; ?>

</div><!-- content -->

<?php $this->endContent(); ?>
4

Yes, this is called Block widget now.

5

How can i use the Block widget to create a layout based on the main layout?

6

If you mean template inheritance, see other templating engines like twig or smarty. AFAIK default engine does not support this.

7

Ah thanks, well, this works (it partial renders the main layout):

layouts/main2.php:


echo $this->render('//layouts/main', ['content' => $content]);

But it’s not very nice, since you need to pass the extra html in $content this way.

I think i’m going for the widget way (put my sidebar inside a widget and call it in the main layout)

Edit, did it like this:

In my base controller i added a


public $partialLayout = null;

so i can set this in my controllers.

In my main layout i used this:


<?php if ($this->context->partialLayout !== null): ?>


                <?php echo $this->render('//layouts/'.$this->context->partialLayout, ['content' => $content]); ?>


            <?php else: ?>


                <?php echo $content; ?>


            <?php endif; ?>
8

Yii2 is pretty good with layouts handling as well and can do what Yii 1 had but with more features. Trick is to use the aliases for paths, when you want to create a layout embedded in another layout file for example:

[html]

<?php $this->beginContent(’@app/views/layouts/main.php’); ?>

<div>Your layout content here</div>

<?php $this->endContent(); ?>

[/html]

9

I see, couldn’t find the beginContent / endContent ;) thanks!