Laravel 5.1 for Beginners

When downloading Laravel, the file structure is very overwhelming and hard to know what is going on. This video will try to warm you up to the important folders and files to pay attention to (as a beginner).

We will take a look at one of the core files of our application which is routes.php and this defines what will happen anytime a user visits any page on your site.

We will go over a handful of different ways to pass variables through the controller to our view. Our view will be able to use that variable and display it.

Laravel has a special, easy to use, syntax that you can use in your views whenever you need to use a variable or process some logic with a foreach loop, if statement, etc. It isn't mandatory but I would highly recommend you dont skip over this. It makes your coding much easier plus EVERY book, video, or example code online uses it so I suggest you get used to it. You won't want to go back to regular php syntax afterwards.

We will need to set up our database configurations and laravel makes that extremely easy for us. In the background, Laravel uses a PDO connection to which ever database driver we want to use and out of the box it comes with drivers for sqlite, MySQL, Postgres, and SQL Server.

Laravel gives us a clean way to make tables in our database with migration files where we can easily design each table. It also gives us an easy way to quickly delete a table and set it back up with the right fields.

We will make a migration for our blogs table and give it all of the attributes it will initially need.

On our terminal, we will use php artisan tinker to create the data for a blog entry and persist it to our database.

Eloquent ORM (Object Relational Mapping) is an amazing abstraction for writing sql statements. Since its an ORM, the table represents a model in your project.

Laravel has a feature called Elixir which is a wrapper class around Gulp. It makes Gulp very very easy to use and it helps developers make the front end development processes much faster with this amazing automation tool.

We can give our routes whats called a 'named route' by using the 'as' syntax and this will make it much easier to create href links to that specific route by calling the route by the name you give it. For example

'as' => 'example.route'

We will generate a RESTful controller by defining a route in our routes.php file by saying route::resource(....). This will clean up our routes.php file

We will bring in the a cool feature for building Forms called HtmlServiceProvider.

Now we will use this FormBuilder to use some new syntax to write up our form for our blog.

We will write a custom FormRequest class that will validate our input data before it is allowed to be stored in the database. This gives our application an extra layer of protection.

/**********************************************************************

login.blade.php file snippet

**********************************************************************/

<div class="container-fluid container-top-extra">

<div class="row">

<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">

<div class="panel panel-default">

<div class="panel-heading">Login</div>

<div class="panel-body">

@if (count($errors) > 0)

<div class="alert alert-danger">

<strong>Whoops!</strong> There were some problems with your input.<br><br>

<ul>

@foreach ($errors->all() as $error)

<li>{{ $error }}</li>

@endforeach

</ul>

</div>

@endif

<form class="form-horizontal" role="form" method="POST" action="{{ url('/auth/login') }}">

<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">E-Mail Address</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="email" class="form-control" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Password</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="password" class="form-control" name="password">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<div class="col-md-6 col-md-offset-4">

<div class="checkbox">

<label>

<input type="checkbox" name="remember"> Remember Me

</label>

</div>

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<div class="col-md-6 col-md-offset-4">

<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">Login</button>

<a class="btn btn-link" href="{{ url('/password/email') }}">Forgot Your Password?</a>

</div>

</div>

</form>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

@endsection

/**********************************************************************

password.blade.php file snippet

**********************************************************************/

<div class="container-fluid container-top-extra">

<div class="row">

<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">

<div class="panel panel-default">

<div class="panel-heading">Reset Password</div>

<div class="panel-body">

@if (session('status'))

<div class="alert alert-success">

{{ session('status') }}

</div>

@endif

@if (count($errors) > 0)

<div class="alert alert-danger">

<strong>Whoops!</strong> There were some problems with your input.<br><br>

<ul>

@foreach ($errors->all() as $error)

<li>{{ $error }}</li>

@endforeach

</ul>

</div>

@endif

<form class="form-horizontal" role="form" method="POST" action="{{ url('/password/email') }}">

<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">E-Mail Address</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="email" class="form-control" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<div class="col-md-6 col-md-offset-4">

<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">

Send Password Reset Link

</button>

</div>

</div>

</form>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

/**********************************************************************

register.blade.php file snippet

**********************************************************************/

<div class="container-fluid container-top-extra">

<div class="row">

<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">

<div class="panel panel-default">

<div class="panel-heading">Register</div>

<div class="panel-body">

@if (count($errors) > 0)

<div class="alert alert-danger">

<strong>Whoops!</strong> There were some problems with your input.<br><br>

<ul>

@foreach ($errors->all() as $error)

<li>{{ $error }}</li>

@endforeach

</ul>

</div>

@endif

<form class="form-horizontal" role="form" method="POST" action="{{ url('/auth/register') }}">

<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Name</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="text" class="form-control" name="name" value="{{ old('name') }}">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">E-Mail Address</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="email" class="form-control" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Password</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="password" class="form-control" name="password">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Confirm Password</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="password" class="form-control" name="password_confirmation">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<div class="col-md-6 col-md-offset-4">

<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">

Register

</button>

</div>

</div>

</form>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

/**********************************************************************

reset.blade.php file snippet

**********************************************************************/

<div class="container-fluid containter-top-extra">

<div class="row">

<div class="col-md-8 col-md-offset-2">

<div class="panel panel-default">

<div class="panel-heading">Reset Password</div>

<div class="panel-body">

@if (count($errors) > 0)

<div class="alert alert-danger">

<strong>Whoops!</strong> There were some problems with your input.<br><br>

<ul>

@foreach ($errors->all() as $error)

<li>{{ $error }}</li>

@endforeach

</ul>

</div>

@endif

<form class="form-horizontal" role="form" method="POST" action="{{ url('/password/reset') }}">

<input type="hidden" name="_token" value="{{ csrf_token() }}">

<input type="hidden" name="token" value="{{ $token }}">

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">E-Mail Address</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="email" class="form-control" name="email" value="{{ old('email') }}">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Password</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="password" class="form-control" name="password">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<label class="col-md-4 control-label">Confirm Password</label>

<div class="col-md-6">

<input type="password" class="form-control" name="password_confirmation">

</div>

</div>

<div class="form-group">

<div class="col-md-6 col-md-offset-4">

<button type="submit" class="btn btn-primary">

Reset Password

</button>

</div>

</div>

</form>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

</div>

We will use the edit and update method on our Resource Controller to, obviously, edit and update a page. We will also use Form Model Binding to be able to edit or update a particular page, or in our case a blog.

We will make our views much more readable by taking out the error snippet and our form code and place them in a partials folder. We will then include them into our view which reduces our main view we are using to just one line making it much more readable. We will also learn how to dynamically change something in a partial that may change based on which view it is included in.

We will finish off our last RESTful (Resource) Controller method. The destroy method is used to delete an item from the database, and in our case a blog entry.