Laravel 5 is the most popular PHP frameworks nowadays. There is no doubt about it. So, if you want to develop fast, painless, and secure applications with PHP, than Laravel, is the number one choice. Besides, Laravel has a very active community of expert developers. It means you can easily find the solutions to every problem. Considering this, We have collected the top 5 best Laravel admin template packages. These packages help you make your next PHP applications in the matter of one hour. Yes, they are such powerful tools.

Best Laravel Admin Template Packages

Below are the lists of top 5 best Laravel admin template packages.

1. Laravel Voyager
2. LaraAdmin
3. AdminLTE Laravel
4. Laravel AdminLTE
5. Laravel Panel

So, The list is base on features and popularity among developers.

1. Laravel Voyager

In one sentence I should say that Laravel Voyager is insanely fantastic. Also, this package worth paying yet it’s free, and you can use it for free. Besides, the Features are appealing. Voyager will take care of your administrative tasks, this way you can focus on what you do best, which is building the next amazing app. So, you can learn more about its features and functionality in the documentation.

2. LaraAdmin

The number second, a straightforward and fast way to built Admin Panel in Laravel as well as a CRM. It’s almost similar to Voyager, but with fewer features. So, LaraAdmin controls your Models, Data and their Role Permissions with no coding at all. Also, it is giving you the state of an art focus towards Data representation than Data Handling.

3. AdminLTE Laravel

We have already covered how to integrate AdminLTE into Laravel 5 projects. But, if you are looking for a package or pre-configured way, this package is your best choice. Though it’s not like a package, you can use it the same as a package. So, It switches default Laravel scaffolding/boilerplate to the AdminLTE template and Pratt Landing Page with Bootstrap 3.0.

4. Laravel AdminLTE

Now, here is the real package for AdminLTE and Laravel. This package provides an easy way to set up AdminLTE with Laravel 5 quickly. It has no requirements and dependencies besides Laravel, so you can start building your admin panel immediately. The package just provides a Blade template that you can extend and advanced menu configuration possibilities. So, a replacement for the make: auth Artisan command that uses AdminLTE styled views instead of the default Laravel ones are also included.

5. Laravel Panel

The last but not least. The LaravelPanel lets you create a simple CRUD (create, read, update and delete) by just one command. Alos, it offers various field types such as text, select box, checkbox, text editor, DateTime, image, autocomplete, tag, colour picker and more.

Conclusion

We come to an end. Many other packages can choose. But honestly, the above list is just amazing ones. They are free, fast, and secure. Besides, you can find some paid packages as well, but those packages can’t-do more than these. So, we hope this article has been informative for you. If you have any questions, feel free to comment it below.

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Laravel is not only an appealing PHP framework, but it has made the community of PHP larger. Developing any SAAS or web application with this framework is easy and flawless. So, as a web developer or PHP developer, you must learn this framework. In this article, we will show you how to integrate a free admin Template with Laravel framework step by step. You will learn AdminLTE plus Laravel 5 integration.

AdminLTE plus Laravel 5 Integration

If you are new to Laravel, we recommend you to read our other tutorials about Laravel first then continue this article. So, we assume you know the basics.

You should know that we are not using any Laravel Packages for this integration. Though there are some Packages that you can install and everything is setup, we show you how you can use npm to install AdminLTE independently.

1. Install a Fresh Laravel 5.5

We will start with a fresh Laravel project so that you can see follow along without any issue.

Laravel new Admin

Or use composer to install.

composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel Admin

2. Install NPM Packages

Now, you should install npm packages. Run the following command in your project directory.

npm install

By default, it will install the following packages.

  "devDependencies": {
    "axios": "^0.16.2",
    "bootstrap-sass": "^3.3.7",
    "cross-env": "^5.0.1",
    "jquery": "^3.1.1",
    "laravel-mix": "^1.0",
    "lodash": "^4.17.4",
    "vue": "^2.1.10"
  }

Of course, you can remove any of them if you want from the package.json file.

3. Install AdminLTE with NPM

As mentioned, AdminLTE is free and open-source. You can download directly from its website or use npm.

npm install admin-lte --save-dev

4. Configure CSS and JavaScript Files

Time to configure CSS and JavaScript files. So, you know that you can configure asset files in resources/assets directory.

Config CSS Files

Open your app.scss file which is in sass folder then add the following line of code at the end.

// import admin lte css

@import "~admin-lte/dist/css/adminLTE.css";
@import "~admin-lte/dist/css/skins/_all-skins.css";

It’s the reference to AdminLTE CSS and skin colours. ( Those files are in node_modules folder )

JavaScript File

Open your bootstrap.js file that’s located in the js folder. Now add the following line of code after try and catch block.

// AdminLTE code here. 
require('admin-lte');

It will add the essential JavaScript files.

5. Compile Files

So far you are done and you can use any component of AdminLTE in your project. But you must compile those file before.

npm run production

The above command will compile and minify the CSS and JavaScript files to the public directory.

6. Make a Master Page.

You can create a master page in the resources/view/layouts directory. Then paste the code from the AdminLTE blank.html to the master page. Now, Remove all the links to CSS files from the header and the same JavaScript files from the footer.

Now just give a link to app.css in the header and a script link to app.js in the footer.

<!-- should be added into the header -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{asset('css/app.css')}}">

<!-- should be added into the footer before body tag ends -->
http : // asset('js/app.js')

If you use this master template now, everything should work except the toggle menu. We will fixe it in the next step.

7. Debug and Fix Problems

So, the toggle menu is not working. To fix it, just add the following code in your app.js which is located in resources/assets/js/app.js

// add custom js 

$('.sidebar-toggle').on('click',function(){

           var cls =  $('body').hasClass('sidebar-collapse');
           if(cls == true){
                $('body').removeClass('sidebar-collapse');
           } else {
                $('body').addClass('sidebar-collapse');
           }

});

Finally, recompile the file. ( step 5 )

Conclusion

So, it was AdminLTE plus Laravel 5 integration with NPM. We hope this article has been informative for you. If you have any questions or any problem during integration, feel free to ask below.

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Finally, Bootstrap 4 has come with a lot of amazing features.  Meanwhile, Laravel 5.5 with LTS version has also released. Laravel 5.5 by default comes with bootstrap version 3. In this article, you will learn how to configure Laravel 5 5 with Bootstrap 4 step by step.

Configure Laravel 5 5 with Bootstrap 4

Step 1. Create a new Laravel project. You can use Laravel install or composer installer. If you have any trouble with installation or configuration of Laravel, We recommend you to read our Laravel tutorials first.

laravel new App

Step 2. Now let’s install bootstrap 4 and npm dependencies. By default, Laravel will download bootstrap 3. You can find it in your package.json file.

Open your cmd or terminal and run the npm install command to install the above dependencies. Make sure you are in the application directory.

Step 3. Once npm dependencies installed successfully, let’s install bootstrap 4. Run the following command.

npm install bootstrap@4.0.0-beta

It will install bootstrap 4 beta version. Now inside your node_moduls folder, you have two folders for bootstrap files.

The first one is bootstrap 4 files.

Step 4. It’s time to configure the CSS and JavaScript files. You can set all of this configuration in the resources/assets directory.

First, let’s see what changes we can bring to CSS files. Open the sass/app.scss. You file must look like this.

// Fonts
@import url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Raleway:300,400,600");

// Variables
@import "variables";

// Bootstrap
@import "~bootstrap-sass/assets/stylesheets/bootstrap";

It’s importing fonts, variables from _variables.scss and bootstrap 3 from node_modules. Now we must point the bootstrap to version 4. You can do it like this.

// Bootstrap
@import "node_modules/bootstrap/scss/bootstrap";

The last changes for CSS files are to open _variables.scss file and change the px values to rem. It’s because bootstrap 4 is not supporting px value anymore.

Now open your js/bootstrap.js file.

Just change the bootstrap-sass to bootstrap.

 require('bootstrap');

Now you are done.

Step 5. Open your cmd again and run the following command to compile down the bootstrap 4 files successfully.

npm run production

It will compile down all the JavaScript and CSS files to public/CSS and js directory.

Here is the list of other commands. Th production command will minify the code as well.

Now you have configured Laravel 5 5 with bootstrap 4. If you view your Laravel app, everything is broken. It’s because bootstrap team rewrote the bootstrap 4. Everything has changed. Read the documentation to see what has changed.

Conclusion

Bootstrap 4 browser support is not very good. For Internet Explorer version, it should be 10+, and other browsers with the latest version will be supported. If you have any issue, feel free to comment it below.

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Laravel is by far the most popular PHP framework in 2017. Developing web applications has never been this much easy. Package in Laravel saves a lot of time while developing complex applications. Meanwhile, packages are developed by expert developers and they are probably painless, secure and bug-free. In this article, we introduce the top 5 Laravel 5 messaging Packages that will help you develop web apps in a matter of minutes.

Top 5 Laravel 5 Messaging Packages list

01. Laravel-Talk

Talk is a Laravel 5 based user conversation (inbox) system with real-time messaging. You can easily integrate this package with any Laravel based project. It helps you to develop a messaging system in just a few mins. Here is a project screenshot that was developed by Talk.

Talk v2.1.0 is supported real-time messaging. Learn more about Talk Live Messaging

Credit: Nahid

02. Laravel Messenger

This package will allow you to add a full user messaging system into your Laravel application.

Features

• Multiple conversations per user
• Optionally loop in additional users with each new message
• View the last message for each thread available
• Returns either all messages in the system, all messages associated with the user, or all message associated to the user with new/unread messages
• Return the user’s unread message count easily
• Very flexible usage so you can implement your own access control

Credit: Chris Gmyr

03. Simple SMS

Simple SMS is easy to use package for Laravel that adds the capability to send and receive SMS/MMS messages to mobile phones from your web app. It currently supports a free way to send SMS messages through E-Mail gateways provided by the wireless carriers. The package also supports 9 paid services, Call Fire, EZTexting, FlowRoute, LabsMobile, Mozeo, Nexmo, Plivo, Twilio, Zenvia, and JustSend.

Credit: Corey McCormick

04. Laravel Sms

A framework based on Laravel the powerful mobile phone number legitimacy verification solution.

laravel-sms2.0 is based on toplan / phpsms developed for the framework of Laravelthe mobile phone number verification solution. Compared to version 1.0, 2.0 is a version that is reconstructed using new ideas, and the upgrade standby agent mechanism is an agent equalization scheduling mechanism. phpsmsTo laravel-smsprovide a full set of SMS sending mechanism, but phpsmsalso have their own service provider, that is to say, you can be in Laravelthe framework of the independent use of barrier-free.phpsms

Credit: Ian tian peng

05. BearyChat for Laravel

Conclusion

It was the top 5 Laravel 5 messaging packages. We hope it helps you create and amazing applications. If you know any better packages, feel free to share with us on the comment bellow. 🙂

The post Top 5 Laravel 5 Messaging Packages You Must Know appeared first on TECHNIG.

When it comes to web development, PHP is the first language that we talk about.  Its’ known as the most popular server-side scripting language in the world. According to w3techs, PHP is used by 81.9% of all the websites who uses server-side programming language. Moreover, PHP 7 is the major version of PHP which is 2 times faster than 5.6. There are many reason that you would choose PHP or hire PHP developers for your business over others languages. For instance: It has a large community of users and developers, support of different database, large open-source application and websites developed with PHP like WordPress, Drupal, and Facebook, works on almost every operating system and platform and much more.

If you are running a company that needs PHP developer or simple you want to start a business of web development with PHP, this article will guide you how and where to find expert developers. More than that, we will introduce you to some top PHP geeks, big communities, developer’s locations and best frameworks.

Why Should I Hire PHP Developers?

As mentioned earlier, PHP is taking almost 81% of the market. If you want to start a company in web design, web development, web application development or SaaS applications, PHP is the perfect choice. Additionally, PHP is one-fourth of the LAMP software stack, frameworks, and server software bundle used to engineer a web site’s back-end architecture. With a number of modern frameworks designed to leverage its speed and scalability, like Laravel, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, yii and the Zend framework, PHP has become a powerful programming language. Though many can reasonably claim to know PHP, those who are true experts in the language are capable of producing complex software that is much more scalable, functional, robust, and maintainable.

In addition, an experienced PHP programmer can develop and manage your CMS, server-side applications, enterprise application, website, or e-commerce platform.

How Can I Find PHP Developers?

Before you hire a PHP Developer, you must ask them about their location, typical work hours, any open source projects they have contributed to or maintained, previous work experience, regarding their education, yearly income and social profiles and some more which we will discuss later. In addition, you should ask them a list of responsibilities that they must do for you. This list depends on your project or company’s needs and requirements. Here is an example list.

• Maintaining existing features of product
• Assisting in contributing new features of applications
• Assisting with customer support for all products
• Researching new technologies that may be of benefit to your product or company
• Help resolve support issues and fix bugs in existing code
• And more…

Essential Requirement for Hiring PHP Developers

• OOP coding with proper design patterns
• MVC framework (Laravel, CodeIgniter, CakePHP)
• Version control,
• SOLID principles
• Working knowledge of relational databases
• Working knowledge of Unit Testing skills
• System Architecture design skills
• Trouble shooting skills
• API’s (REST, JSON, SOAP)
• HTML & CSS / SASS / LESS
• SEO knowledge
• Basic server management
• Excellent written communication (English)
• Customer support

Skills That Earn You Bonus Points

• Working knowledge of API design
• Vue / Angular
• Bash scripting
• Bootstrap or other frameworks
• Turning PSDs into clean HTML / CSS
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Open source contributions
• Passionate and initiative.
• Stays up to date with current tools, libraries and standards
• Knowledge of CMS (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla)
• Being a nice, friendly person
• And more… (if you have any)

Top PHP Frameworks and Big Communities

This section will introduce the top best PHP frameworks and their advantages with community, popularity and job offers. The only reason why we familiarize you to PHP frameworks is to make you aware of the best options possible for your business.

Laravel

Laravel is the number one and best PHP framework. It has change the whole PHP community and application developments. Over the past few years, I have tested a few PHP frameworks, but none of them attract me as much as Laravel did. There are many reason you would want to hire a developer with knowledge of Laravel, but there are a few main reasons.

• Building an Authentication and Authorization Systems
• Integration with Mail Services
• Powerful SaaS application scaffolding with Spark
• Integration with Tools for Making Web Applications Faster
• Fixing the Most Common Technical Vulnerabilities
• Big and Active Community
• Configuration Error and Exception Handling
• Automation Testing Work
• URL Routing Configuration
• Separation “Business Logic Code” from “Presentation Code”
• Message Queue System (Delayed Delivery) Configuration
• Scheduling Tasks Configuration and Management
• And Much more.

CodeIgniter

Codeigniter is another popular PHP framework which is develop using most famous architectural the MVC design pattern and its consider by lots of companies as a most user-friendly framework for small to large scale project. CodeIgniter is easy to install and get going, but it has less pre-made components to speed up your development work-flow. The community is a little inactive. It has been around for a long time and there are many companies still use it. All in all, the only thing I can say about CodeIgniter is this that, it’s fast, it has very good documentation but it’s like a grandfather of PHP Frameworks.

Yii

Yii is easy and fast development framework. It back by good number of community support. Yii has support excellent caching system, Security with validation, Unit Test, RBAC and many more. Its popularity for most of PHP developers is due to its features like fast development, caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing, etc.

Symfony

Symfony is a stable PHP framework widely used by PHP developers to create websites and web applications. It is a flexible, scalable yet powerful PHP framework. It has a huge community of Symfony fans committed to take PHP to the next level. Symfony has plenty of reusable PHP components that can be used like Security, Templating, Translation, Validator, Form Configuration and more. Beside that all, Laravel also uses Symfony Component in the core framework codes.

Who is the winner?

Actually, we can’t say you should change your business community to Symfony or Laravel or wise versa. If you are starting a business from scratch, without any favoritism, we would suggest you Laravel. Here is the graph by google that shows how laravel Community is growing up.

Where to Find and Hire PHP Developers?

Coming to final destination, how and where you can hire php developers? By now, I hope you can select which types of developer you need and which is best for your business. Finding PHP developer is easy but knowing whether they are expert or not is the hard part. There are simple tips that will help you recognize their expertise.

• Ask them what they have done so far.
• Ask their biggest PHP project they have completed.
• Ask their contribution on Open-Source projects.
• Look how much contribution they have on gitbub.

It doesn’t really matter how many certificates they have. But it matters how much contribution, activity, and complex project they have produced so far.

Top Best Resources to Find Expert PHP developers

1.Stack Overflow

I can say, stack overflow the number 1 top resource for developers. You can find and hire PHP developers based on their activity and reputation they have earned.

2. Github

I believe 100% of developers have github account. You can find how much they are expert by their contribution to open source project and their own project popularity.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is generally the best place to look for and  hire PHP developers are also there.

4. Laracast Community

Laracast is a great resource for learning Laravel. Beside that, they have a great community with php developers that you can hire.

Top Expert PHP Developers

Rasmus Lerdorf. Creator of PHP.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub

Taylor Otwell. Created Laravel.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub

Matthew Weier O’Phinney. Open-source software architect. Project lead for Zend Framework. Zend-certified engineer and member of the Zend Education Advisory Board. Speaker and writer.
Blog
Twitter
Ohloh

Jordi Boggiano. Lead developer on Composer. Symfony2 developer. Partner at Nelmio.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub

Dries Buytaert. Original creator and project lead of Drupal. President of the Drupal Association. Co-founder and CTO at Acquia.
Blog
Twitter

Jeffrey Way. Creator of Laracast.

Twitter

Github

Sebastian Bergmann. PHP quality assurance pioneer. Creator of the PHPUnit test framework and co-founder of thePHP.cc.
Blog
Twitter
GitHub

Conclusion

All in all, it was just a comprehensive guide-line from finding to hire PHP developers. You must remember that their is no expert developer until the have any big project or big contribution to others projects. Only their experience and portfolios can revel how much expert they are. We hope this article help you find your best developer you need. If you have any question regarding this top, feel free to comment it bellow. 🙂

The post How to Hire PHP Developers for Web Applications? appeared first on TECHNIG.

We have a few articles about Laravel framework, but we have not shown how to in install and Laravel in production. If you have ever tried to install Laravel in your site, you might have seen some problems that needs to open public folder in order to run the site properly. In short, when you open the Laravel application directory, you expect to open the application index file. But it’s showing the directory structure and the files and folders. In this tutorial we will show you how to solve this problem step by step with proper and reliable way to change Laravel 5 public folder.

Introduction

Before starting, let’s see the default directory of Laravel and how you might run the Laravel projects. If you install Laravel inside www directory of you wamp or mamp, you probably go to localhost/laravelapp direcotry. In this cause you have to navigate to public directory and it will show you the application home page. On the other hand, if you install Laravel out of the www directory, you can run it through artisan command.

php artisan serve

I this case, you don’t need to open the public directory. All you need to do is to open localhost::8000 on windows OS. It will open the Laravel home page.

The point is here, if you put your project online for production, you can’t run php artisan serve command there, and you don’t want to open public folder to see your home page as well. Now let’s learn how to solve this problem.

How to Change Laravel 5 Public Folder?

Mainly there is two way to do solve this problem. Using htaccess or changing the directory structure. We will got the second option which is the best way and reliable way as well.

Step 1

The default directory will look like this.

Create a folder inside this directory and move all the files except public folder. We will create a folder and name it technig.

Step 2

Move all the files that are inside public directory one folder back. Your folder structure should look like this.

Now you can delete the public folder,

Final step

Open the index.php file that you see in the above directory and change the following lines of code.

require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/autoload.php';

change it to

require __DIR__.'/technig/bootstrap/autoload.php';

And the another line near line 36.

require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php';

change this one to

require __DIR__.'/technig/bootstrap/app.php';

You are don’t know. If you open you application directory now, you will see you Laravel home page.

Conclusion

It was an easy and reliable way to change Laravel 5 public folder. If you face any problem during this file changing laravel files, feel free to comment it bellow. We hope it help you. 🙂

The post How to Change Laravel 5 Public Folder to Your Site Name? appeared first on TECHNIG.

A WYSIWYG (pronounced “wiz-ee-wig”) editor is one that allows you to see what the end result will look like while the interface or document is being created. WYSIWYG is an acronym for “what you see is what you get”. Today you will learn how to add wysiwyg editor in Laravel 5 project with a few simple steps.

What is the Purpose of Wysiwyg in Word Processing?

WYSIWYG implies a user interface that allows the user to view something very similar to the end result while the document is being created. The purpose of using wysiwyg editor is to make text editing easy and simple. Using markdown is the other way of editing the text, but that is a little hard and you must learn the syntax of markdown language to be able to use it.

Which Wysiwyg Editor in Laravel to Use?

There are many options for Using wysiwyg editor in laravel, but which one is better and essay to use? We will point out to a few with it’s pro and cons, but will show you how to use one of them in you project. As Laravel grow up, developers contribute a lot of packages for Laravel, including packages for wysiwyg editors. The example packages are: laravel-editor by Vinelab and laravel-ckeditor by UniSharp. But, this packages need a little configuration. What we are going to show you is a custom wysiwyg editor. Again there are many chooses. Ckeditor editor, froala editor and summernote are the good examples of wysiwyg editors. We are going to show you how to use summernote editor. Of course they will not pay me anything or there is no limitation about which one to use, but I personally like it, because it’s easy and simple to use.

How to Use Summernote Editor with Laravel 5?

To use Summernote, I assume you have basic knowledge of using laravel, like creating form and adding JavaScript to your project. If you know them, let’s start adding this amazing wysiwyg editor in laravel 5.

Now, I have a create.blade.php in my view directory of my laravel project. Inside that, I have a very simple form.

{{Form::open([‘route’ => ‘post.store’])}}

{{Form::close()}}

Adding Summer Note.

Now, go to summernot.org getting start page, and download the JavaScript and css fiels. Once you download the files, put it anywhere in your laravel project. I put mine on public directory. To add the css and JavaScript files, use the assets function. like so,

 http://!!asset('/assets/css/summernote.min.css')!!

 http://!!asset('/assets/js/summernote.min.js')!!

make sure you have referenced the directory correctly. I have add the above code in master.blade.php, so you will do the same of course.

At the bottom of the master.blade.php file, open a script tag and add the summernote code.

    
        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('#technig').summernote({
              height:300,
            });
        });
    

Summernote uses the jQuery framework as well, so make sure you have jQuery added to your project. As you can see, you can add some more properties to summernote functions to make it look the way you want. I have added the height:300, to make it height of the textarea 300px. You can see other properties in the official documentation of the summernote.

Now you have the following editor in your project.

Conclusion

It was all about it, I have it has been helpful for you, if you have any question, feel free to comment it below, we will solve it for you. 🙂

The post How to Add Wysiwyg Editor in Laravel? appeared first on TECHNIG.

If you are developing application with Laravel, and haven’t used Laravel elixir, you are missing a cool feature of this framework. Laravel Elixir will speed up your site loading, specially when you have so many http request. If you want to speed up your site and automate some task, than you must learn how to use elixir in your next Laravel project.

What is Laravel Elixir?

Imagine if you have so many css, JavaScript, less, scss or coffesript files to add in your Laravel Project, you might  probably include each of them like this:

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{!!asset('/assets/dist/css/font-awesome.css')!!}">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{!!asset('/assets/dist/css/bootstrap.css')!!}">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{!!asset('/assets/dist/css/style.css')!!}">

For each file you include in you project, it will send a http request. It means as much as your assets files are more, your http requests are more, your site will be to much slow.

In laravel Elixir, you will do like this

<link href="{{ elixir('css/app.css') }}" rel="stylesheet">

You include your css once, and it will include all your css files. But before using elixir, you must know how to combine them?

To combine the assets, you must use any task runner. Task runner is something like bower, if you are have ever use. We will use Gulp. If you are using Laravel 5.+, you have already everything setup. All you need is Nodejs or nmp installed in your computer. If you don’t know what nmp is, no worries, just to to nodejs.org and install nodejs. NPM is Node Package Manager. It will allow you install packages to your project using command line tools.

So, to make sure you have nodejs installed on your machine, run the following command on cmd or terminal on mac.

node -v

It must show the nodejs version. If it gives any error, it means nodejs is not properly installed on your computer.

How to use Gulp and Laravel Elixir?

Alright, now lets use Gulp to combine our assets. Before that, run the npm install in your Laravel application directory. It will take a few minutes to install the necessary file in your application. Once it’s done, go to your application root and open the gulpfile.js file. It should look like following:

var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');

/*
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 | Elixir Asset Management
 |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 |
 | Elixir provides a clean, fluent API for defining some basic Gulp tasks
 | for your Laravel application. By default, we are compiling the Sass
 | file for our application, as well as publishing vendor resources.
 |
 */

elixir(function(mix) {

    mix.styles([
      'test.css'
    ]);

});

Inside elixir function, you can define your CSS or JavaScript files to be combine in single file. By default, if you write only the file names, it will search in resource\assets\css or resource\assets\js directory. If your files are anywhere else. you can change that of course.

You can add more assets file in elixir function to combine in one file.

elixir(function(mix) {


    mix.styles([
      'test1.css',
      'test2.css',
      'test3.css'
    ]);

  	mix.styles([
      'test1.js',
      'test2.js',
      'test3.js'
    ]);


});

Now, You can run the gulp command in your app root, and it will generate a CSS file in public\css\all.css . 

And one file for JavaScript in same directory js\all.js.

To include the file, open the master blade or any other view and use elixir function to include the file generated in public directory of you app.

Example:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ elixir('css/all.css') }}">

<script src="{{ elixir('js/app.js') }}"></script>

We are done!!. this much easy. Now if you look at you application size, it has increased to 120+ MB. You might be surprise, why this happened. Well there is a new folder in your application root (node_modules). You can remove that folder when your application development completed and you send it for production.

Conclusion

There are a lot more that Laravel Elixir can do, like compiling less, scss, coffeScript files and auto prefixing the new CSS3 properties. So, I hope it has been informative for you, if you have any question or error, feel free to comment it below. 🙂

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We have talked about Laravel Framework so many times. It’s easy to use, flexible and fast. It’s true that, if you do not practice, you will never learn anything. As much as Laravel is amazing to use, it’s hard to master as well. In today’s tutorial, we will show you the tips and tricks about, how to share data to all views in laravel 5.2.

How to share data to all views ?

Imagine if you have an options table on you database that store all your application settings and you want to show it’s content to every view. So how you do that?

Laravel made it easy. One way and the most short and basic way to share data to all views is to use view:share(). Let see and example. The same above example, you have your options table in you database and you want to access its data in your master.blade.php page or any there view.

Our table structure for Options table in database looks like this:

id - int : auto-increment 
name - varchar : 50
value - varchar : 50

Open your AppServiceProvider.php which is under App/Providers direcory. Your code might look like this:

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use Auth;
class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot()

    {
       //
    }

    /**
     * Register any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function register()
    {
        //
    }

}

Now, add the following codes. Make sure you add the use App\Option Model at the top

<?php

namespace App\Providers;

use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
use App\Option;

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
    /**
     * Bootstrap any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function boot()
    {
      $companyName = Option::find(1);
      $copyRight = Option::find(2);
      view()->share('companyName', $companyName);
      view()->share('copyRight', $copyRight);
    }

    /**
     * Register any application services.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function register()
    {
        //
    }

}

Inside boot function we created two variable for two row in option table. the first one contain $companyname, and the second one is for $copyright. (if you have more, you can add more)

So, the view->share() will take two arguments. First one, a name to be accessible in views, and second the data that pass to views.

How to access data in views?

As I said, the first argument is the name that you can access the data with. So, in your view, just echo the variable. example

<p>
  {{$companyName}}
</p>

<!-- or -->

<p>
  {{$copyRight}}
</p>

Conclusion

So, that was it. Very easy and simple. There are some other says also that you can share data to all view like view composer. We will cover those topic in future tutorials. I hope it has been informative for you.

The post How to Share Data to All Views in Laravel 5.2 appeared first on TECHNIG.

Developing application with Laravel framework has become very easy. If you want to develop any web application, you will definitely refer to Laravel as PHP developer. Beside other amazing features that Laravel 5 gives us, here is something called Faker Seeds in Laravel 5. In this short tutorial will learn what Faker Seeds in laravel 5 is, and how to use them in our project to speed up our development. 5

What is Faker Seeds in Laravel 5?

Basically, Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you and Seed is a class in Laravel for seeding test data to your database. Faker is just a library, it’s not only for Laravel, you can use it on any other PHP projects as well. Even if you develop a small application, you will need some test data to work with. So Faker and is the best library to generate random data for your database.

How to use Faker seeds in laravel 5 ?

Now, how to use it in our Laravel projects. The good news is this that it’s already included in every laravel 5 project and you don’t need to worry about any extra work or installation.  All seed classes are stored in database/seeds directory.

Imagine if you want to generate some 5 to 10 post for your blog project, you will create a seed class in your seed directory. You can give your class any name, but it’s better to be sensible convention. To create a seed file, you can create it manually, as well as using artisan command. 

To create a seeder class for our post, open command line and navigate to your project directory. Now write the following command.

php artisan make:seeder PostsTableSeeder

Now you have a File called PostsTableSeeder.php seeds folder. Open the file and you will see the following codes.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Faker\Factory as Faker;

class PostsTableSeeder extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {
        //
    }
}

Probably, you one line of code is missing from your code and that is the second line which says : We are using Fakder library in this class.

Generating Test Data.

Now, lets generate some test data. To do so, you must run the seeder, but before running the seeder, you must add some extra lines of code to your seeder class. Inside run function, you must specify the column name with type of data you want to put in.

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Faker\Factory as Faker;

class PostsTableSeeder extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {
      $faker = Faker::create();
      foreach (range(1,5) as $index) {
        DB::table('posts')->insert([
            'title' => $faker->catchPhrase,
            'content' => $faker->paragraph,
            'created_at' => $faker->dateTime($max = 'now'),
            'updated_at' => $faker->dateTime($max = 'now'),
        ]);
      }
    }
}

What the above code do?

First we have created an instance of Faker class to the variable $faker. Now we can use the $faker object to access the types of data we want to insert in database. There are many types of data that you can explore in Faker Documentation here. We have just used some basic types like catchPhrase, paragraph and datetime. The foreach will loop 5 times and generate 5 record in database which you can increase or decrease those numbers.

So once you wrote the necessary code for your database table, you can run it through php artisan.

php artisan db:seed --class=PostsTableSeeder

The above command will Generate 5 posts for your posts table in the database.

Conclusion

You will not learn anything unless you practice it. So if you want to master in Laravel or any other things, you must start doing it practically. Of course there is a lot that you can do with Faker and seeder in Laravel, but is was just the basics. I hope you have learned something from this tutorial, till next time keep practicing.

The post How to Use Faker and Seeds in Laravel 5? appeared first on TECHNIG.

Previously, we learned how to install and configure Laravel framework. And now we are going to continue our topic about how Laravel routing and views works. If you haven’t install Laravel yet, I recommend you to review our previous topic about how to install laravel 5 on windows, both using composer and windows installer.

What is Laravel routing ?

Simply, routing is just how Laravel respond to URL’s request. All Laravel routes are defined in the app/Http/routes.php file, which is automatically loaded by the framework. Routing is the core components of Lararvel framwork. It looks a little complex at first, but once you get comfortable with basics you will be amazed by this feature of Laravel.

Before starting, go to your Laravel root directory and open command line, than write the command “php artisan serve” (without quote). This command will run your web server on port 8000.

Now you can access your Laravel project at “http://localhost:8000/“.

To work with Laravel routs, you should open app/Http/routes.php file in your Laravel project and. All Laravel routs are written there.

Imagine if you have: Home, About and a Contact page for your site. The users might look for those page like this;

for Home page:

http://localhost:8000/

for About page:

http://localhost:8000/about

and for Contac page:

http://localhost:8000/contact

So in Laravel routs you file, you can write it like this;

// For Home page
Route::get('/', function () {
    return view('home');
});
// For About page
Route::get('/about', function () {
    return view('about');
});
// For Contact page
Route::get('/about', function () {
    return view('contact');
});

The above code is just basic way of routing in Laravel.

The Class Route has a static method called get(), which accept two values or arguments. The first one is the directory, and the second one is the function which will be called after the user call the specified directory.

I real world applications, you will not call the views directly from routes, instead you will call the controllers and the controller will call the targeted view.

Laravel Route Parameters

Of course, sometimes you will need to capture segments of the URI within your route. For example, you may need to capture a user’s ID from the URL. You may do so by defining route parameters. let’s do learn it by writing an example.

You might want to capture students name from url:

// get the parameter of name
    Route::get('students/{name}', function($name) 
    {
        return 'Students Name is ' . $name;
    });

Now in your browser, you can access the student name like this “http://localhost:8000/students/ali”.

Laravel Optional Route Parameters

For this example, let’s say we have a gallery of photos. We also have categories of photos. The category will be optional, if the user set the category, it will show all images from that category, if not it will show all images.

// optional category
    Route::get('gallery/{category?}', function($category) 
    {
        // if category is set, show the category
        // if not, then show all
        if ($category)
            return 'This is the ' . $category . ' section.';
        else 
            return 'These are all the photos.';

    });

Conclusion

So, its was just basic and starting of Laravel routing. I hope it has been informative for you, if you have any question of you want say anything about the tutorial feel free to comment it below, and I will join the discussion. 🙂

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