Updated for Laravel 5.8. Currently working on a slight rewrite for a v4 release of this package. Will be released soon.
This is WebDevEtc's BlogEtc package. It has everything you need to quickly and easily add a blog to your laravel app.
FOR 5 MINUTE INSTALLATION GUIDE (with video guide), PLEASE VISIT THE INSTALL GUIDE HERE
Install guide โข Packagist << MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS. They're simple, but must be followed.
- Includes all views, routes, models, controllers, events, etc
- Public facing pages:
- View all posts (paginated)
- View all posts in category (paginated)
- View single post
- Add comment views / confirmation views
- Search (full text search), search form, search results page.
- Admin pages:
- Posts (CRUD Blog Posts, Upload Featured Images (auto resizes)
- View all posts,
- Create new post,
- Edit post,
- Delete post
- Categories (CRUD Post Categories)
- View all categories,
- Create new category,
- Edit post,
- Delete post
- Comments (including comment approvals)
- View all comments,
- Approve/Moderate comment,
- Delete comment
- Upload images
- as well as uploading featured images for each blog post (and auto resizing to multiple defined sizes), you can upload images separately.
- view all uploaded images (in multiple sizes)
- Posts (CRUD Blog Posts, Upload Featured Images (auto resizes)
- Public facing pages:
- Includes admin panel
- Create / edit posts
- Create / edit post categories
- Manage (approve/delete) submitted comments
- Allows each blog post to have featured images uploaded (you can define the actual dimensions) - in large, medium, thumbnail sizes
- fully configurable via its
config/blogetc.php
config file. - Includes all required view files, works straight away with no additional setup. All view files (Blade files) use Bootstrap 4, and very clean HTML (easy to get your head around). You can easily override any view file by putting files in your
/resources/views/vendor/blogetc/
directory - Built in comments (using the database), can auto approve or require admin approval (comment moderation).
- Other options include using Disqus comments or disabling comments.
- Includes unit tests.
- Fires events for any database changes, so you can easily add Event Listeners if you need to add additional logic.
- < 5 minute install time and your blog is up and working, ready for you to go to the admin panel and write a blog post - see full details below, but this is a summary of the required steps:
- install with composer,
- do the database migration, copy the config file over (done with
php artisan vendor:publish
) - chmod/chown the
public/blog_images/
directory so featured images can be uploaded for each blog post - and then add 1 method to your
\App\User
file (canManageBlogEtcPosts()
- but please see the install instructions to get everything up and working
- For websites running Laravel (5.6)
- Who want to have a site blog, and have an easy to use interface to write blog posts/assign categories/manage existing posts
- Where only admin users can edit/manage the blog (this is not suitable for every user on your site to be able to manage posts)
- Where you understand that posts can (potentially) contain JS or any other code, so you should only allow trusted admin users to add/edit/delete/manage the blog posts
- Sites where you want your (normal, non-admin) users to write blog posts. You must set
canManageBlogEtcPosts()
on your user model to ONLY allow trusted users.
-
Anyone who can manage blog posts (defined by the
canManageBlogEtcPosts()
method you add to your User model) can submit any HTML which is echoed out. This is a security issue. If you don't trust the content you should add a custom view and escape the blog content before echoing it, and setuse_custom_view_files
in the config to false. -
if
use_custom_view_files
is enabled in the config (which it is by default), it means that any post with a custom view file set (details in the docs) can include any file within/resources/views/custom_blog_posts
, which blade will execute. This package gives no method to edit any file within that directory though.
Please see our BlogEtc Laravel Blog Package Documentation/install guide for install instructions. (It is very simple - done via composer/artisan commands, plus adding one method to your \App\User model (canManageBlogEtcPosts()
which should return true
if this user can manage the blog).
This is easy to do, and further detail can be found in our BlogEtc Laravel Blog Package Documentation.
After doing the correct vendor:publish
, all of the default template files will be found in /resources/views/vendor/blogetc/ and are easy to edit to match your needs.
It will auto set all required routes (both public facing, and admin backend). There are some config options (such as changing the /blog/ url to something else), which can be done in the blogetc.php file.
Please see the BlogEtc config option documentation here for details.
All config options have comments which describe what they do. Please just refer to the blogetc.php
file in your /config/ dir.
You can find all the events that are fired by looking in the /src/Events
directory.
Add these (and an Event Listener) to your EventServiceProvider.php
file to make use of these events when they fire.
There is a built in captcha (anti spam comment) system built in, which will be easy for you to replace with your own implementation.
Please see our Captcha docs for more details.
This is a list of features or things that I want to eventually get round to adding
- Better UI for uploading images/viewing uploaded images
- Link uploaded images to blog post. At the moment they are not related.
- Allow users to remove a featured image from a blog post.
- Option to use HTMLPurifier to sanatise output.
- Better options for assigning post authors (currently it just assigns the currently logged in user). However, if site has 10,000+ users do we really want an UI interface for this? The alternative is to add something like a a is_admin field to the
users
table and only show admin users. - Possibly add tags (we already have categories) but I am not sure how useful they really are, given that we already have categories.
- Pagination for comments on view single post? At the moment we limit it to a high number (default in config is 5000).
- RSS feed: shows from full (stripped tags) ->html of blog post (although has a setTextLimit() on it) - need to trim this, and if it uses custom view files then it should render that (without html).
- Email notification to admin when new comment is added
- RSS to use generate_introduction() for its contents.
- Added full text search and search views. You have to enable it in the config file (see latest config file)
- Need more than the 3 default image sizes? Add more in the config/blogetc.php file, add the database column for it and it'll work!
Image upload errors?
Try adding this to config/app.php:
'Image' => Intervention\Image\Facades\Image::class
- Also make sure that /tmp is writable. If you have open_basedir enabled, be sure to add :/tmp to its value.
- Ensure that /public/blog_images (or whatever directory you set it to in the config) is writable by the server
- You might need to set a higher memory limit, or upload smaller image files. This will depend on your server. I've used it to upload huge (10mb+) jpg images without problem, once the server was set up correctly to handle larger file uploads.
-4.x - Currently work in progress. Will be released start of July 2019. For Laravel 5.8.
- 3.1 - minor fixes
- 3.0.3 - fixed RSS feed cache issue
- 3.0.2 - fixed default medium image size (changed to 600x400)
- 3.0.1 - replaced all short tags (<?) with full opening ones (<?php)
- 3.0 - Added separate functionality for uploading images (and save some meta data in db)
- 2.1 - added 'short_description' to db + form, and BlogEtcPost::generate_introduction() method will try and use this to generate intro text.
- 2.0 - added full text search (enable it via the config file - it is disabled by default).
- 1.2 - added WYSIWYG, few smaller changes
- 1.1.1 - added basic captcha
- 1.0.5 - composer.json changes.
- 1.0 - First release
- 0.3 - Small changes, packagist settings.
- 0.1 - Initial release
Please contact me on the contact from on WebDev Etc or on twitter and I'll get back to you asap.