Partial templates – usually just called “partials” – are another device for breaking the rendering process into more manageable chunks. With a partial, you can move the code for rendering a particular piece of a response to its own file.

You can render a partial in your views with Partial::factory() like you would normally do with the View class. The big difference is that the filename you specify will be prefixed with an underscore.

For example, Partial::factory('contact/form') will render a partial named contact/_form.php in your application's views directory.

A lot of the time, we have an array of objects we need to iterate through to display. For example, in a blog, we want to list a few posts. In your view you might be using something like this:

<?php foreach ($posts as $post): ?>
<div>
    <h3><?php echo $post->title; ?></h3>
    <?php echo $post->content; ?>
</div>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Using partials, you can simplify your views a bit by using the collection() method:

<?php echo Partial::factory('posts/post')->collection($posts); ?>

This one-liner will render the partial named posts/_post.php for every item in $posts. Each item is accessible in your partial as a variable named after the partial. In this case, the variable is $post:

<div>
    <h3><?php echo $post->title; ?></h3>
    <?php echo $post->content; ?>
</div>

Clone the Git repository into your modules directory:

$ git clone git://github.com/gevans/kohana-partials.git modules/partials

Or, clone the repository as a submodule:

$ git submodule add git://github.com/gevans/kohana-partials.git modules/partials

You can now enable the module in your application's bootstrap.php:

<?php
Kohana::modules(array(
    // ...
    'partials' => MODPATH.'partials', // Partial templates
    // ...
));