Not for 'how-to' coding questions but PHP theory instead, this forum is here for those of us who wish to learn about design aspects of programming with PHP.
What's your opinions on header/footer templates. Would it be more efficient to generate a class that has them and pass the variables like title, etc? Or is it more efficient/easier to just create the pages and include those pages?
Depends on the scope of your application. If the header and footer would always be the same, have a static include.
If it needs to be done dynamically use a function.
If you need to filter HTTP request, or access the database or, more general, process the some data (as in modify data), use a class.
Yeah i follow in Sami's footsteps - Always a class for anything larger than say just printing text to the screen. It makes you group all the related functions and have a completly self-contained unit that you can use on other projects.
I don't want to bring up that old function vs class discussion at all, but to blindly vote for OOP for something as simple as an include is somewhat one-eyed. It depends entirely on the scope and purpose of the application. Perhaps bobbyaa could shed some light on what he wants to do and what it's for.