README

This package lets you create pages using Markdown or Blade without having to worry about creating routes or controllers yourself.

Essentially, you create either content/pages/foo.md or resources/views/pages/foo.blade.php and the page will be accessible on the /foo route.

Markdown files use a pre-defined Blade view to get rendered. Blade files are meant for pages which don't follow the default layout and need more custom styling.

For instance, you could have the /pricing route use a Blade file (pages/pricing.blade.php) with a pretty design that accompanies your pricing copy.

Whereas for /about, you could have a simple Markdown file (content/pages/about.md) that describes your service using pure text without any special graphical elements.

We use this on the ArchTech website — the About, Careers, and Open Source pages are simple Markdown files.

Installation

Require the package via composer:

composer require archtechx/laravel-pages

Publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=archtech-pages-config

And finally, add this line to the end of your routes/web.php file:

ArchTech\Pages\Page::routes();

This line will register the routes in a way that ensures that your routes take precedence, and the page route is only used as the final option.

Important: Before attempting to visit URLs managed by this package, make sure that you configure it to use the correct layout (see the section below). Otherwise you might get an error saying that the view cannot be found.

Usage

Markdown pages

To create a markdown file, create a file in content/pages/. The route to the page will match the file name (without .md).

For example, to create the /about page, create content/pages/about.md with this content:

---
slug: about
title: 'About us'
updated_at: 2021-05-19T19:09:02+00:00
created_at: 2021-05-19T19:09:02+00:00
---

We are a web development agency that specializes in ...

Blade pages

To create a Blade page, create a file in resources/views/pages/. Like in the Markdown example, the route to the page will match the file name without the extension.

Therefore to create the /about page, you'd create resources/views/pages/about.blade.php:

<x-app-layout>
    This view can use any layouts or markup.
</x-app-layout>

Configuration

You'll likely want to configure a few things, most likely the used layout.

To do that, simply modify config/pages.php.

The config file lets you change:

the used model
the used controller
the layout used by the markdown views
the view file used to render Markdown pages
routing details

The layout is used by the vendor (package-provided) Markdown view. You'll likely want to set it to something like app-layout or layouts.app.

If you'd like to change the file that renders the Markdown itself, create resources/views/pages/_markdown.blade.php (the _ prefix is important as it prevents direct visits) and change the pages.views.markdown config key to pages._markdown.

And if you'd like to customize the routing logic more than the config file allows you, simply register the route yourself (instead of calling Page::routes()):

Route::get('/{page}', ArchTech\Pages\PageController::class);

Ecosystem support

The package perfectly supports other tools in the ecosystem, such as Laravel Nova or Lean Admin.

For example, in Laravel Nova you could create a resource for the package-provided Page model (ArchTech\Pages\Page) and use the following field schema:

public function fields(Request $request)
{
    return [
        Text::make('slug'),
        Text::make('title'),
        Markdown::make('content'),
    ];
}

Git integration & Orbit

This package uses Orbit under the hood — to manage the Markdown files as Eloquent models. If you'd like to customize some things related to that logic, take a look at the Orbit documentation.

The package also uses another package of ours, Laravel SEO, to provide meta tag support for Markdown pages. We recommended that you use this package yourself, since it will make handling meta tags as easy as adding the following line to your layout's <head> section:

<x-seo::meta />

Password-protected routes

The package also lets you protect certain routes with passwords. To add a password to a page, simply specify the password key in the YAML front matter:

password: 'foo'

Now if a user wants to visit the page, he will have to include ?password=foo in the URL, otherwise he'll be presented with a 403 error.

- /about
+ /about?password=foo

archtechx / laravel-pages

Maintainers

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