I have a simple Email() class. It's used to send out emails from my website.

<?
Email::send($to, $subj, $msg, $options);
?>

I also have a bunch of email templates written in plain HTML pierced with a few PHP variables. E.g. /inc/email/templates/account_created.php:

<p>Dear <?=$name?>,</p>
<p>Thank you for creating an account at <?=$SITE_NAME?>. To login use the link below:</p>
<p><a href="https://<?=$SITE_URL?>/account" target="_blank"><?=$SITE_NAME?>/account</a></p>

In order to have the PHP vars rendered I had to include the template into my function. But since include does not return the contents but rather just sends it directly to the output, I had to wrap it with the buffer functions:

<?
abstract class Email {
    public static function send($to, $subj, $msg, $options = array()) {
        /* ... */
        ob_start();
        include '/inc/email/templates/account_created.php';
        $msg = ob_get_clean();
        /* ... */
    }
}

After that I realized that the PHP vars are not rendered as they are being inside of the function scope, so I had to globalize the variables inside of the template:

<?
global $SITE_NAME, $SITE_URL, $name;
?>
<p>Dear <?=$name?>,</p>
...

So the question is whether there is a more elegant solution to this? Mainly I am concerned about my workarounds using ob_start() and global. For some reason that seems to me odd. Or this is pretty much the common practice?