Liam Hammett has written up a post to his site covering the use and creation of helpers for Laravel's Blade templating. He shows the use of a package he's created to help make using them with custom callbacks simpler.

Laravel’s Blade templating engine offers a ton of convenient directives you can use to make your view files beautiful and abstract anything that may be too complex or verbose to live inside HTML. It even gives a really handy way to add your own custom directives using the Blade::directive(…) method.

However, the callback in custom directives only receives a single parameter?—?the raw string expression from the view file. [...] As this seems to be the most common use case, I put together a package that attempts to help make these helper functions that little bit easier to define without the boilerplate of returning the string or having to consider what an expression may be when creating a directive.

In his package he introduces a new method that defines the name of the method and the name of the function to call. This second option can also be a custom callback function, making it even more flexible.

Freek Van der Herten has a post for the Laravel users out there showing how to use custom HTML components in your Blade views making use of this package.

Today we launched our newest package called BladeX. In short this package provides you with an easy html like way to render custom html components in your Blade views. In this blogpost I'd like to introduce the package to you.

He starts by describing an example application where reusable components could be helpful (things like alert messages, form components and layout parts). He then shows how to create a component for an alert message that can be used via the @component functionality in Blade as a sort of "include and use" call. He shows how to pass in variables, use slots, and prefix components. He wraps up the post going "under the hood" and showing how it works via a service provider and how they made the package (and why).

On the Laravel News site they've shared a list of five useful Blade directives that you may not have known about. Blade is the templating language included with the Laravel framework by default.

We’re going to look at five Laravel Blade directives you can use to simplify your templates, and learn about some convenient directives that make solving specific problems a cinch! If you’re new to the framework, these tips will help you discover the excellent features of Blade, Laravel’s templating engine.

The five on their list provide functionality to:

1. Check if the user is authenticated
2. Check if the user is a guest
3. Include the first view if it exists or includes the second if it doesn’t
4. Include a view based on a condition
5. Include a view if it exists

Each one comes with example code showing it in use and a bit of explanation behind its use.

On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing some of the new Blade directives coming in the 5.6 version of the Laravel framework.

Laravel 5.6 will include two new form blade directives for cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and HTTP method input, thanks to Taylor Otwell.

The new CSRF handling replaces the previously used format with a simple @csrf tag in the Blade template (inside of the form). The other is related to the method used to submit the form. The new addition allows you to submit the form via something other than POST using the method_field function.

In a new post to the Laravel News site they highlight a package that adds a set of common Blade directives to your Laravel application.

With no shortage of excellent blade extensions circulating in the community, you should also check out the appstract/laravel-blade-directives package.

Whether you end up installing the package or copying a few that you like to your project, here are some notable directives from the project.

Directives included in the package can be used to: check the current route for a match, see if a value is true or not, inline the contents of a CSS file and many more. Check out the full post for examples of these and others the package includes. The source for the package can be found in this repository on GitHub.

On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted showing you how to use Blade's View::first functionality to dynamically show a template if it exists.

When building dynamic components or pages sometimes we want to display a custom template if it exists or otherwise fall back on a default one.

[...] We can solve this problem with a series of conditionals or by using view()->exists() to check if a custom template exists or not, however, Laravel 5.5 brings us a better and more elegant way.

A screencast of the functionality in action is included as well as a text-only version with code samples showing the previously used "if view exists" check and the refactor to use View::first instead.

This dynamic view loading feature was added to Blade in Laravel v5.5 and is a great way of keeping your controllers simple by avoiding extra conditionals when dealing with dynamic templates.

On the Laravel News site there's a recent post showing a feature coming in version 5.5 of the framework that will help make creating error views easier:

Coming in Laravel 5.5 is a new and improved design for the error pages. The default errors will extend from an errors::layout file and get some small design additions over the current style with flexbox and a vertically centered message.

They compare the older version to the newer, cleaner one and how you can still, even in 5.5, have your own custom error pages named based on the HTTP error code (like 500.blade.php or 403.blade.php). They end the post covering the renderHttpException and how it determines which of the error templates to use.

The Laravel News site has a new post today describing a feature of the upcoming Laravel 5.4 release: the ability to define language files with JSON formatted files.

One of the most wanted requests we receive at Laravel is introducing better support for multilingual web applications, there are already packages out there that add some nice functionality to Laravel for better handling of multilingual projects requirements, but one of the painful issues when building such applications is managing translation keys.

Previously the trans/trans_choice helper to reference the value defined in the PHP array from your language files by a key name. With this new functionality, a new __() helper method is defined that will look through the English translation file, locate the correct key and find the matching record in the requested language to return. They also show how to pass in some parameters into the translator and how to use it directly from Blade.

On the Laravel News site there's a post about an upcoming feature in the Laravel framework's Blade templating functionality: components and slots.

A new feature coming to Laravel 5.4 is the ability for you to add Components and Slots to Blade templates. This feature was inspired by Vue.js and allows you to simplify building HTML elements into reusable areas.

In most applications you have a master layout and then sub views that extend it. [...] Using the new Laravel Blade Components you can create [a template] with a special variable [for easy replacement].

The post then shows how to "reimagine" views using this slots and components functionality in a simple template/view example, replacing data based on names rather than it having to be passed to the view as data.

In this post on his Medium blog INANI El Houssain shows you how to create a custom directive for use with Laravel's Blade templating language. In this example he shows how to make a custom switch statement, something commonly used on the PHP side to select an action based on a value.

One of the good points of Laravel’s framework is that it allows you to make your own components, macros and directives. so today we will make use of Laravel’s Custom Blade directives and make something good.

He starts with a simple "hello world" example to show where the pieces all live, outputting a simple "Hello $name" string. He then moves into the creation of the "@switch" directive having it write out the PHP code required for the switch to start and end. He adds in two more tags to start and end the different cases: @case and @endcase. The post wraps up with an example of all of these tags in use and how to catch when the value under evaluation might be empty.