Laravel Blocks Core

An extensible block system for Laravel that allows for extremely flexible content to be associated with your models.

Installation

To get started creating your own content blocks, first pull in this core package by running this in your command line:

composer require laravelblocks/core

After installed you'll need to run the migration to create the necessary table in your database:

php artisan migrate

Usage

Parent Models

If you want a model to be able to have content blocks, it simply needs to use the HasBlocks trait like so:

class Post extends Model
{
    use \LaravelBlocks\Core\HasBlocks;

    // ...
}

Content Models

To create your own content blocks, you need to create a model that extends the abstract Content class. This class extends the traditional Eloquent Model class, so any Content class you create will also be an Eloquent Model. The only function your class needs to implement specifically is the render function, which should return the view or HTML content you want to be rendered whenever this block is displayed.

class Paragraph extends \LaravelBlocks\Core\Content
{
    public function render()
    {
        return '<p>This is a paragraph.</p>';
    }

    // ...
}

Of course the render function can have whatever logic you want or use any attributes you've added to your block model. For more complex blocks, you can even use Blade templates and return the view in this function.

It's highly recommended that any bits of HTML that get rendered for a block are generated programmatically, and not from values in the database. If you use HTML from the database, it makes it much easier for a malicious package to create rogue models in your database and render dangerous content onto your website.

Rendering

When you want to render a block, you can simply call the block's render function. Because this function will likely return some HTML, the function results will need to be escaped. If you're rendering all the blocks for a HasBlocks model, in a Blade template, it might look something like this:

@foreach ($post->blocks as $block)
    {!! $block->render() !!}
@endforeach

Note that the $block->render() call is placed within {!! ... !!}. This is necessary so that any HTML rendered by the block is not escaped and displays properly. This is why it is important to strictly control what HTML can make it into these render functions, and why it is recommended that you either hard-code the HTML tags or use views within the render function itself.