Best method of including views within views in CodeIgniter

Honestly I prefer to do this by having template views then loading that with the necessary data from the controller, it means a lot less repeated code and follows the DRY concept better than loading views from views. Especially for things like headers, footers and menus.

So my template view would look something like this:

template.php

$this->load->view('header',$title);
$this->load->view('sidebar',$sidebar_content);
$this->load->view('main_content',$main_content);
$this->load->view('footer');

Then in my controller I pass the data required to the template like this:

$data['title'] = 'Home Page';
$data['sidebar_content']='pages/standard_sidebar';
$data['main_content'] ='pages/my_home_page'; 
$this->load->view('template',$data);

There are a number of benefits to doing it this way. First is I can have multiple templates, for example I have, in my case, two main ones, one for full page views without a sidebar and one for pages with a sidebar, I also call an if statement to decide which header to include, the regular one or the one with the admin menu in it.

Yes I could include the header, sidebar and footer in every main view page, but that ends up in a ton of duplicate code. And what happens if for example I want all my pages to have something new, some other small snippet? Using templates I add the snippet to the appropriate template and it's done. Going the other route I find every page and add the snippet view there, it's the equivalent to having CSS in the page in my opinion, wasteful and not ultimately maintainable.

Views within other views are called Nested views. There are two ways of including nested views in CodeIgniter:

1. Load a nested view inside the controller

Load the view in advance and pass to the other view. First put this in the controller:

<?php
// the "TRUE" argument tells it to return the content, rather than display it immediately
$data['menu'] = $this->load->view('menu', NULL, TRUE);
$this->load->view ('home', $data);
?>

Then put <?=$menu?> in your view at the point you want the menu to appear.

2. Load a view "from within" a view

First put this in the controller:

<?php
  $this->load->view('home');
?>

Then put this in the /application/views/home.php view:

<?php $this->view('menu'); ?>

<p>Other home content...</p>

About best method, I prefer the 1st method over 2nd one, because by using 1st method I don't have to mix up code, it is not like include php. Although indirectly both are same, the 1st method is clearer & cleaner than 2nd one!