In a complex component, there will be a number of /views/viewname/tmpl/default.php (or similar) files. It is quite likely that different views will share common features. Duplicating code is generally a bad thing, to be avoided. What is the best way to share code between different templates? Still allowing for overrides of the shared code?
2 Answers
Joomla Layouts can be used to share common parts of a View between multiple files. A search and some reading on Layouts will mostly be around how to override the Layouts and from a modifying the template point of view but if you look through some of the core components in the /layout directories you can get an idea of how to use them in the Views of your components.
Some reading to get you going, https://docs.joomla.org/J3.x:Sharing_layouts_across_views_or_extensions_with_JLayout
https://phproberto.com/en/13-jlayout-improvements-for-joomla-3-2
Some time ago, I invented a snippet system for my component which lives in the /tmpl/ folder. I can reuse those snippets and users can still override them using plain old template overrides.
Joomla has something which is similar/better: Layouts. I would send you in this direction.
Here are some examples in the Joomla repository: https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/tree/4.0-dev/layouts
