Thanks Joe. Verne, the whole reason why it may (to some people…) be worthwhile, is when one does this, the whole code is left fully alone, except for the PHP within the designated blocks. So if one is an old-school HTML/CSS handcoder like myself, who wants to be able to include identical snippets into all of a large pile of files, it becomes very easy by this method. As Joe mentioned, server-side includes are another way, the yet older way, of doing this, but I don’t like that because it can be rather particular to the individual server, and by doing this I’ve been able to standardize on VirtualMin for quite a few years now. I have not actually seen page-loading slowness by this, though I am using nice and fast server resources.
Security certainly does make sense as another concern. I do keep it simple though, carefully thought-out includes are all I’m doing.
I have thought of converting my hand-coded sites to CMS or framework, but it just seemed like far too much labor for the result, and the result was always a whole lot slower when I tried it. But I do have two TextPattern sites as well, and I quite adore TP, it is very very fast indeed. I have been looking for a TP-like fast CMS with image-and-text flow, and other text formatting, better than TP/Textile have had, but have not found one yet.