Sebastian De Deyne has a new post to his site showing the Laravel users out there a method for theme-based views in their applications using vendor namespacing in a multi-tenant environment.

I'm building a multi-tenant Laravel application. One of the requirements of the project is that every client can have their own theme based on their corporate guidelines. By default a few css adjustments will suffice, but some clients request a completely different template.

Conditionally loading a different stylesheet per client is pretty trivial, but in order to use a completely different view per theme you quickly end up typing the same thing over and over across various parts of your application.

[...] There aren't any huge issues here, but all together it feels like we should be able to do better. There are a few strategies to clean this up, but I just want to talk about vendor namespaces today.

He gives an example of a view setup that makes use of the current client/customer's namespace to define the path to the template. He found this leading to a lot of redundancy and figured out a better way: using namespaces. Namespacing is mainly made for package development but can be use here to create a "theme" namespace. This namespace can then be defined once and reused across the application without the need to manually build the template location string every time.