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Hessam Notes > Blogs Page > Laravel > Blog Packages
April 22, 2020

Laravel Blog Package

As I showed you the problems I encountered in story about Laravel blogs article, in this article I’ll show you how to install and use a great laravel blog package which adds blog functionality to your website and is compatible with laravel 6 and higher.

You can check out the code on GitHub.

Minimum Requirements

Laravel6.x, other requirements is installed during package installation

Benefits

Everyone who use Laravel framework, can get benefit from this package. You can customize it and make any changes to fit your needs. This works with your existing user and role management.

This package gives you a dashboard to manage your blog and posts and a front-end to show your posts. You can customize the blade templates to be fit with your UI.

Installation Instructions

  1. Install via composer
composer require hessam/laravel-blogger

For a fresh Laravel installation run the following too:

composer require laravel/ui
php artisan ui vue --auth
  1. Run the following two commands to copy config file, migration files, and view files
php artisan vendor:publish --provider="WebDevEtc\BlogEtc\BlogEtcServiceProvider"

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=laravel-fulltext

swisnl/laravel-fulltext this package is used for text search. In config/laravel-fulltext.php file change exclude_feature_enabled to true and exclude_records_column_name to is_published.

  1. Execute migrations to create tables
php artisan migrate;
  1. You must add one method to your \App\User model. As the name of this method shows it determines which user can manage posts. Place your logic there. 
 /**
     * Enter your own logic (e.g. if ($this->id === 1) to
     *   enable this user to be able to add/edit blog posts
     *
     * @return bool - true = they can edit / manage blog posts,
     *        false = they have no access to the blog admin panel
     */
    public function canManageBlogEtcPosts()
    {
        // Enter the logic needed for your app.
        // Maybe you can just hardcode in a user id that you
        //   know is always an admin ID?

        if (       $this->id === 1
             && $this->email === "your_admin_user@your_site.com"
           ){

           // return true so this user CAN edit/post/delete
           // blog posts (and post any HTML/JS)

           return true;
        }

        // otherwise return false, so they have no access
        // to the admin panel (but can still view posts)

        return false;
    }
  1. Create a directory in public/ named blog_image
  2. Congrats! Your blog is ready to use, you can access the panel on /blog_admin.

I work on this package to add more features. I have some to-dos for this that I list it here. You can comment if you see something is missing or is necessary.

  • Add pagination for comments
  • Category Hierarchy
  • Multi-language support

I added a feature to swisnl/laravel-fulltext package (through a pull request) to fix an issue in search functionality. It’s important to do the config setups to work this search properly, otherwise it returns blogs which are not published in search result.

I’m online most of the time feel free if you need tips, you can talk to me with online chat.

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April 22, 2020

A Story about Laravel Blogs!

In this article, first I’ll tell you what problems I encountered and then I analyze some existing Laravel based platforms for laravel blogs.

laravel blog solutions

The Scenario

First let me explain the scenario that I dealt with it. Consider when you have a Laravel project and you want a blog functionality for it.

My scenario has some requirements for blog system, for example the blog functionality must support commenting, defining categories for posts, be light-weight, giving front-end, and be flexible for further customization. Also preferably it’s better using a free solution.

Feasible Solutions

Based on the mentioned requirements (even without the requirements), we have some solutions:

  • The easiest way is to use a package which provides blog functionality
  • Using some platforms which act as basis for our website, really they are a complete Laravel setup
  • Integration with other blog platforms like the most popular WordPress

Let’s look at each of these ways. But I begin from the last solution. Also obviously there is a solution that you can build a blog system from scratch which fits your needs exactly, but you should consider all aspects of a blog.

Integration with other Platforms

I checked integration with WordPress. There are some ways and packages to do it you can check this article to know more about this.

This approach has some big drawbacks for example it has an overhead over your website and for some scenarios it’s a little complicated. You can also try to share sessions between Wordpres and your Laravel website through JWT or a solution like Auth0 which acts as a intermediate layer between your WordPress and your Laravel website. Also there are some considerations, this approach assumes you use WordPress as your authentication engine which may conflicts with your needs.

wordpress and laravel integration

If you use this approach and handle these drawbacks this is the best way, because you get benefit from a powerful platform like WordPress which is specifically designed for blogs.

A Complete Laravel Setup

There are powerful platforms which give you a fresh setup to your website and you can build your logic over them. One of the most popular is October cms. When you install this software you have a complete Laravel website. But when you see the underlying code, the structure is a little different from the fresh Laravel setup. It also offers new concepts over the Laravel. Also it does not support commenting out of box. All of these issues show that you need another expertise plus your Laravel knowledge to develop your business logic. And for your existing Laravel project it has nothing to say.

Other platforms like Pyrocms and Lavalite have same issues. In Pyrocms you must pay for commenting functionality.

The main issue with these platforms is that you should adapt yourself and logics to their platform and you must learn to develop them.

Blog Packages

Canvas and other publishing platforms have good editors but they have big drawbacks, like lack of front-end, weak customizability, and also lack of commenting..

Twill platform has some drawbacks like October platforms, which you must spend much time to learn about customization. Also Twill has its own models for user authentication!

I found the a laravel package as a good starting point for an existing and running Laravel project or even if you are going to begin your project. It’s light-weight and is compatible with your existing authentication system. But it had a drawback, which was not compatible with Laravel 6 and higher. Also it does not support multi-language feature.

I made it compatible with Laravel 6 and higher through another package which I’ve explained at this article.

Conclusion

It’s up to you to choose between these solutions, but I prefer a solution which does not make me dependent to any platform, and ease of customization is one of my considerations.

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