A Menubuilder for Laravel 4, Twitter Bootstrap, Cartalyst/Sentry 2, and Dark/SmartyView., (*1)
Introduction
In developing a number of projects using Laravel4, Sentry2, and Smarty, I needed a way to manage menus in the GUI. In the past, I've built menu tables in the database and menu editors, but in general I don't need that level of flexibility (or overhead)., (*2)
So this time around, I was looking for a way to define my menus in code and generate menus automatically. What I came up with was this Menubuilder, which I am now rebuilding into a package which I will use in multiple projects., (*3)
Note that this project is tailored very closely to my requirements and may not be suitable outside of my context., (*4)
Pull requests are welcome. Please note that I am using git flow for my workflow. Don't know what that is? Check out http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flow/., (*5)
Or have a look at one of these screen casts:, (*6)
(The links above were found at https://github.com/nvie/gitflow)., (*7)
Usage
Somewhere in your code (it doesn't matter where), define a menu by inserting a comment like this:, (*8)
// @menu <menu text>|<menu icon>|>sort order>
or, in a docblock:, (*9)
/**
* @menu <menu text>|<menu icon>|>sort order>
*/
For example,, (*10)
// @menu Administration|icon-star|5
The line above defines a menu with the title "Administration", a Twitter Bootstrap start icon, and a sort order of 5 (ie. it comes after 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4)., (*11)
Menu items are inserted into your code in a similar way:, (*12)
// @menuitem <menu>|<item text>|<item icon>|<route>|<permissions>|<sort order>
or, (*13)
/**
* @menuitem <menu>|<item text>|<item icon>|<route>|<permissions>|<sort order>
*/
For example,, (*14)
// @menuitem Administration|List Users|icon-user|list-users|user.list|3
This defines a menu item under the "Administration" menu with the text "List Users", a Twitter Bootstrap "user" icon, routes to "list-users", requires the "user.list" permission, and has a sort order of 3., (*15)
Taken together, the two examples above give a menu that looks something like this:, (*16)
+------------------+
| * Administration |
+------------------+
| x List Users |
+------------------+
(where the 'x' is the user icon)., (*17)
The menus are generated via an artisan command:, (*18)
php artisan menu:make
This command will scan your source files and extract all the @menu and @menuitem lines, parse them, and write a configuration file: app/config/menus.php., (*19)
This configuration will then be used at run time to generate menus., (*20)
The menubuild provides a method to generate the appropriate menus: Menubuilder::build()., (*21)
I use it in a default view composer to ensure that the menus are built automatically for each page:, (*22)
View::composer('*',function($view){
// add the menus (if any)
$view->with('menus', Menu::build());
// add other stuff here...
});
The build() method returns an array that looks something like this:, (*23)
Array
(
[Administration] => Array
(
[icon] => icon-star
[sort] => 5
[items] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[text] => List Users
[icon] => icon-user
[route] => list-users
[permission] => user.list
[sort] => 1
)
[1] => Array
(
[text] => Add New User
[icon] => icon-user
[route] => create-user
[permission] => user.edit
[sort] => 1
)
)
)
)
This menu can be passed to a view to be rendered as you see fit., (*24)
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