What is phtml, and when should I use a .phtml extension rather than .php?

Solution 1:

There is usually no difference, as far as page rendering goes. It's a huge facility developer-side, though, when your web project grows bigger.

I make use of both in this fashion:

• .PHP Page doesn't contain view-related code
• .PHTML Page contains little (if any) data logic and the most part of it is presentation-related

Solution 2:

.phtml was the standard file extension for PHP 2 programs. .php3 took over for PHP 3. When PHP 4 came out they switched to a straight .php.

The older file extensions are still sometimes used, but aren't so common.

Solution 3:

It is a file ext that some folks used for a while to denote that it was PHP generated HTML. As servers like Apache don't care what you use as a file ext as long as it is mapped to something, you could go ahead and call all your PHP files .jimyBobSmith and it would happily run them. PHTML just happened to be a trend that caught on for a while.