I have fairly complex HTML document to generate that is of the form
<head> (a css that needs to be inserted here) </head>
And a body with several flavors of templated bits of HTML. Simplistically, I'd probably have one PHP function (let's pretend the domain is news articles since that's simplest) like
generateNewsBlob($title, $author, $imageSrc)
showUserInfo($userInfoStruct)
//etc.
that will output HTML with the arguments filling in the templates.
At minimum I just want a nice folder with easy to edit PHP and easy to edit HTML and CSS. As of now I have it all smooshed together in a .php file - something like
'lots of HTML <img src="' . $imgSrc . "'> more HTML ...' which makes it very hard for our designer to make modifications and our coder (that'd be me) to make modifications. So I need this to be decoupled. But I'm not sure how to have a pure html file that has "holes" to be filled in by the php, because I would implement those holes in PHP... catch-22.
It's been suggested in a previous SO question that MVC is the way to accomplish this. This sounds believable but I have no actual idea how to go about this. I can't bring in any IDE - a developer should be able to work on this in a text editor from console.
Python and Java are also options if those would happen to be "better."
There are lots of MVC frameworks for PHP and other platforms. http://www.phpwact.org/php/mvc_frameworks There are lots of benefits to using those but if you want something simpler, you can just use a PHP templating engine http://www.smarty.net/