Blog

A fully develop Blog CRUD package that allows you to manage blogs, using Blog content managing meta data with Tags & Collections.

How does this package work? This package offers a few aspects and provides a great base for creating a blog page for your project. The main features are:

1. A Blog model with the ability to add tags and make it part of a collection
2. Ability to add more users with author roles (which have default policy rules - which can be overwritten)
3. Built in Factories for easy seeding, development & testing
4. CRUD operations such as Actions, Requests & Controllers to be used - Controllers are coming soon...

For Future reference The main 3 models of this package are:

1. Blog: Containing columns such as title, author_id, meta related columns and content ... and more
2. Tag: A name but can be added to a blog (A Blog HasMany Tags) - used to help users understand the base topics of the blog
3. Collection: A name and description - best used for concepts like a tutorial series (A blog BelongsToOne)

Example Use Case

1. A personal blog page which you want an easy implementation for to manage blogs
2. A new blog page where you can add multiple users with restrictions through the author rule + additional roles & policies

What this package does not offer

1. At this point in time this package does not offer a set of front end components. This is strictly a laravel crud package.
2. Manage separate users

Steps for Development

Installation (via composer)

composer require sethsharp/blog-crud

Adding Service Provider

Add to your config/app.php

'providers' => [
    \SethSharp\BlogCrud\BlogServiceProvider::class
]

Publishing the Migrations

Then to publish the migrations: php artisan vendor:publish --tag="blog-crud-migrations"

Publishing the Config File

The config file contains package reliant values. When published that can be edited to suit the project and your coding style. php artisan vendor:publish --tag="blog-crud-config" Things that you can override include:

1. Models: Allows you to create your own models - by replacing it is automatically injected into relationships within other package models
2. Image Driver: We use the laravel-intervention library for image resizing - this defaults to gd(), but imagick() is available
3. Bucket Paths: Allows you to specify your own paths for local & production environment in your S3 bucket

Other Requirements

File System This package does rely on AWS S3 logic when it comes to file uploads, via the Blog Cover or the images you can upload within your blog. So ensure that your AWS credentials are properly configured, specifically this array within your config/filesystems:

's3' => [
    'driver' => 's3',
    'key' => env('AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID'),
    'secret' => env('AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY'),
    'region' => env('AWS_DEFAULT_REGION'),
    'bucket' => env('AWS_BUCKET'),
    'url' => env('AWS_URL'),
    'endpoint' => env('AWS_ENDPOINT'),
    'use_path_style_endpoint' => env('AWS_USE_PATH_STYLE_ENDPOINT', false),
    'throw' => false,
],

Usage

It is encouraged that you explore this package, it is very straight forward and simple so it is easy to integrate what it has to offer for your use case. As the logic you implement to use Actions & Requests may be different to others, as well as other practises. However, lets go over some basic use cases.

Update a Blog

use App\Http\Controllers\Controller;
use Illuminate\Http\RedirectResponse;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Models\Blog\Blog;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Actions\Blogs\UpdateBlogAction;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Requests\Blogs\UpdateBlogRequest;

class UpdateBlogController extends Controller
{
    public function __invoke(Blog $blog, UpdateBlogRequest $updateBlogRequest, UpdateBlogAction $updateBlogAction): RedirectResponse
    {
        $blog = $updateBlogAction($blog, $updateBlogRequest);

        $drafted = (bool)$updateBlogRequest->input('is_draft');

        return redirect()
            ->route('dashboard.blogs.index')
            ->with('success', $blog->title . ' successfully ' . ($drafted ? 'drafted' : 'published'));
    }
}

This is an example UpdateBlogController, using all the files from the package; Blog, UpdateBlogRequest & UpdateBlogAction. Reading each of these files will ive you an understanding of what they expect - so its up to you to ensure you pass the correct information.

Booting Policies

This package contains 3 policies; Blog, Tag and Collection Policies. Each needing to be booted into your project for proper use

use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Models\Blog\Tag;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Models\Blog\Blog;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Policies\TagPolicy;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Policies\BlogPolicy;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Models\Blog\Collection;
use SethSharp\BlogCrud\Policies\CollectionPolicy;

// the rest of your provider

public function boot()
{
    Gate::policy(Blog::class, BlogPolicy::class);
    Gate::policy(Tag::class, TagPolicy::class);
    Gate::policy(Collection::class, CollectionPolicy::class);
}

Tips

If you wanted to add another column such as publish_at to define when to publish the blog through a console command, you just need to define this attribute by extending the rules in the UpdateBlogRequest, then passing that data to UpdateBlogAction it will automatically assign that variable. Any further logic will need to be manually done by yourself.