Normally, I'm a Java guy, but I've chosen PHP due to the prevalence of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP ) platform. All we're really doing here is using variable and Server Side Includes to give our templates consistency and flexibility.
This is not actual production code here. This is just a break down of the initial HTML into a nice PHP boilerplate. If you want to save this to a file for now, may I suggest /boilerplate.php:
<?php
/* the document title in the <head> */
$documentTitle = "jQuery Mobile PHP Boilerplate";
/* Left link of the header bar
*
* NOTE: If you set the $headerLeftLinkText = 'Back'
* then it will become a back button, in which case,
* no other field for $headerLeft need to be defined.
*/
$headerLeftHref = "/";
$headerLeftLinkText = "Home";
$headerLeftIcon = "home";
/* The text to show up in the header bar...