laravel-blog

This package is a flexible blogging solution that you can add to your Laravel app.

Is takes blog entries from storage and publishes them to the Web in common formats for consumption by people and machines through URLs.

Each blog gets:

• An index page listing the latest entries
• A page for each blog entry displaying its full contents
• An Atom feed

The default storage is Eloquent, but you can write your own BlogEntryProvider should you wish. Have a look at the files in src/Contracts for a quick overview of the entites this package handles.

Admin interface

This package does not provide any admin interface for editing blog entries. There are plans for a (near) future release of a separate package that can optionally be installed to provide admin routes for editing blog contents.

For now, you'll need to create the mechanism to edit blog entries yourself. Entries are represented by Eloquent models by default, so shouldn't be too hard for Laravel developers.

Requirements

You need at least Laravel 5.6.8 to use this package.

Usage

1. Require the package:

   composer require bjuppa/laravel-blog

   The package will automatically register itself.

2. Publish the configuration file:

   php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\BlogServiceProvider" --tag="blog-config"

3. Edit the published configuration file config/blog.php to setup your desired blogs and their options.

   Configurations may be changed later and more blogs can be added etc. Just remember that permalinks and generated entry IDs should ideally be kept constant after a blog has been published to avoid broken feeds and links for your audience.

   The service provider handles registration of routes to all configured blogs. You can check which routes and paths are generated using:

   php artisan route:list

4. Run migrations to automatically set up any tables needed to use the configured blog entry providers:

   php artisan migrate

5. (optional) If you want to create a default blog entry in the database you can run the seeder:

   php artisan db:seed --class="Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\Database\Seeds\DefaultBlogEntrySeeder"

6. (optional) If you want to use the included styling, first publish the CSS to your public directory:

   php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\BlogServiceProvider" --tag="blog-styling"

   ...then edit config/blog.php and add 'css/blog.css' to the stylesheets config.

Now visit your fresh blog in a browser! The default url path is /blog unless you've changed the config.

Edit blog posts

Add and edit blog entries in the database any way you like. You can create your own admin interface, write straight to the database, or perhaps use php artisan tinker... The model used by default is Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\Eloquent\BlogEntry.

There are plans for a separate package providing an admin interface.

Blade templates

The package keeps all its Blade views in resources/views and running this command will publish all of them into resources/views/vendor/blog of your app so you can edit them:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\BlogServiceProvider" --tag="blog-views"

...however you probably only need to change a few bits in just some files. I'd recommend you to only commit the files you actually change to version control, and remove the rest of the published files that you have not changed from your app. Blade will fall back to using the package's views for any file not found in the vendor view directory.

Localization

This package contains English translation strings that can be published to your app using this command:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Bjuppa\LaravelBlog\BlogServiceProvider" --tag="blog-translations"

If you're not adding translations for a new language, you probably don't need all the files and not even all the strings within a file. Consider overriding just the ones you want, as explained in the Laravel documentation.

Styling the frontend

The included CSS file is built using Kingdom CSS, which is yet another CSS framework, created by... yours truly.

The default styling is meant to add some consistent styling to the standard HTML elements, so a blog using it will not look "designed", although it has some opinionated layout and spacing (especially on a larger screen). You could say it has a "brutalist" approach, it even uses browsers' default fonts.

Using the included utility classes

Blog authors may want to add some special styles to elements within their entries. Some classes are useful on elements that are on the first level within entry contents:

• .full-bleed will expand the element to cover the entire width of the viewport - great for images.

• .start-margin-bleed and .end-margin-bleed will make the element cover the left or right margin.

• .span-content will make the element cover both columns when the screen is big enough for a two-column view - good for elements that require more space, but not the full width.

• .blog-related-content will move the the element into the first available row of the second column - great for <aside> elements and other content that is related to the entry, but doesn't need to follow exactly in the flow.

  (The ads section is an example of this, that goes into the first free slot of the second column)

  If your related content needs to cover more than one row in the second column, you can add utility classes .grid-row-span-2, .grid-row-span-3, etc (from Kingdom).

The included CSS contains many of Kingdom's utility classes, unfortunately they're too many to document here, please refer to the original SASS files:

• _colors.scss
• _borders.scss
• _sizing.scss
• _spacing.scss
• layout/_lists.scss
• layout/_screenreaders.scss
• layout/_floats.scss
• layout/_grid.scss
• text/_whitespace-wrapping.scss

Creating your own styles

You probably want to create your own styles to apply your personal touch or branding. The stylesheets config in your config/blog.php is where you can include any CSS files you want into your blog.

You can add a list of files so you can combine this package's CSS file with an additional CSS file containing your own styles. Or you can use Laravel Mix to combine them into a single file.

If you're feeling adventurous, pull in the Kingdom npm package and use it in your build. You may draw inspiration from, or even include, the SASS files from this package.

Background

When looking for ways to add a simple blog to an existing Laravel app I found many packages and some complete Laravel apps, but none of them did what I expected:

Provide a highly configurable blog add-on that can be integrated into any Laravel app.

Povilas Korop had written a blog post about it some half a year before I ran into the same need. This package is my attempt at getting myself a couple of blogs without resorting to WordPress and hopefully provide something useful for other developers.

My needs were

• One ore more blogs must be configurable within the same Laravel app
• Simple configuration after package install (ideally just running migrations if only one standard blog)
• Publish Atom feeds
• Provide a default Eloquent model for posts, but make it user replaceable per blog
• Configurable urls to avoid clashes with existing app routes
• Flexible and replaceable default views
• Named routes for easy linking from the rest of the Laravel app
• Optional admin panel, so you can write or use your own admin pages if you already have one