I will also post some tutorials that have been requested on the forums, so look forward to those coming up soon.

By the way, I’ve got a special tutorial series coming up, in which I rewrite the code for this website with Laravel. It’s currently on WordPress, but I don’t need that extra bloat for a simple blog, so I’ll be scrapping all that in favour of Laravel.

This is part of a series of posts designed to help a newcomer to the Laravel PHP framework find their way around. By the time this series is through, we’ll know the ins and outs of this amazing little framework. Now, enough talk, let’s get to work!

Routes – The Functionality & Views – The Looks

Within Laravel, routes define what URLs users will access to use your application. Routes can respond to the four different HTTP verbs: GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE. GET is the standard verb used when entering a URL into your browser’s address bar. POST is generally used when submitting forms. PUT is meant for updating data, but is rarely used, and DELETE is fairly self explanatory.

We’ll cover using GET routes today, but we’ll cover POST in the short future, which is related to form handling.

All the code we create today will be going in the application/routes.php file, which we covered briefly in last day’s tutorial.

By default, the routes.php file provided by Laravel has only one route:

'GET /' => function()
{
	return View::make('home.index');
},

This is the route which responds to http://localhost/laravel/public. Any code we place within the curly braces will be executed when that URL is accessed. What if we want to respond to other URLs? No problem, just create a new route:

'GET /newroute' => function()
{

},

That’s all we need to create a new route! Simple, right?

Coding our Own Custom Route

Now, we need some actual code to execute in this route. In the previous tutorial, we just echoed “Hello World!” and we were done. Today, we’re going to go a bit more in depth.

Currently, the default route is returning a View when we access it, which is the most common response when creating routes. It is returning the view located in application/views/home/index.

Now, let’s keep working on our “newroute” route. We’re going to create a view to display in our route. Create a new file, index.php in application/views/newroute. It doesn’t actually need to be in the /newroute directory, but it helps with organization. Within this file, we’re going to put in our code for the webpage that we want to display when a user visits our route.

Open up that newly made index.php file, and put this code (or something similar), within it:

	
		

	

	

Hello!

Hum-drum-de-dum....


	

Now we need to update our “newroute” route in application/routes.php to reflect this new view:

'GET /newroute' => function()
{
	return View::make('newroute.index');
},

That should let us view the view when we visit /newroute in our browser. The URL to access should be along the lines of http://localhost/laravel/public/index.php/newroute.

A few notes:

1. When selecting a view in your route, you can also use “newroute/index” instead of “newroute.index”, both work just fine.
2. Notice that index.php in the URL to access newroute? That’s needed for the routing, but it’s so ugly! Surely there’s a way to remove it? No worries, we’ve got you covered. You’re just going to need to create a .htaccess file in your root directory, but if that’s a bit confusing, check out this tutorial.
3. What about that public in the URL? That’s kind of ugly too. But just hold on, we’ll deal with that in the future, once we have something a bit more production ready. If you’re really curious, leave me a comment below, and I’ll do my best to help you.

Binding Some Custom Data to our View

So serving up a static page is fine and dandy, but what about when we want to deliver dynamic content? Luckily for us, Laravel has us covered by providing us with the with() method.

Let’s add a simple title to our view. To do this, we’re going to open up our application/views/newroute/index.php file, and change the title (line 5) to this:

Now we need to give that variable a value. To do this, we’ll use the bind method!

Open the routes.php file (application/routes.php), and change the newroute route to this:

'GET /newroute' => function()
{
	return View::make('newroute.index')
		->with('title', 'Our Awesome Title');
},

This code will bind the $title variable with the value “Our Awesome Title” which will display as the title whenever we view the newroute route.

Usually in a Laravel deployment, we would bind database data to our variables, but we’ll get to that in the future.

That’s a Wrap!

Well that’s all for today, folks. We covered the very basics of GET routes and views, which make up the backbone of Laravel. Next day we’ll cover POST routes, and working with forms.

There’s always a great opportunity for discussion in the comments, so if you have any questions regarding the usage of Laravel, leave them below.

Many people see programming as a form of art, and I’d like to be able to have a place for these people to express it. Whenever you create a piece of code that you think is creative, poetic, or funny, then you should head on over to code-poetry.ecustom.ca and submit it!

I’d like for you guys and gals to head on over there and contribute something if interested. Currently there are no posts, so I encourage you to be the first!

This is part of a series of posts designed to help a newcomer to the Laravel PHP framework find their way around. By the time this series is through, we’ll know the ins and outs of this amazing little framework. Now, enough talk, let’s get to work!

Naming Routes

Within Laravel, it is often useful to be able to name our routes. One of the main reasons for this is for URL related actions (e.g. redirecting, building URLs automatically, etc). When a route is named, we can more easily link to it using Laravel’s built-in functions.

Naming a route in Laravel is really easy:

'GET /newroute' => array('name' => 'new_route', function()
{
	return View::make('newroute.index');
}),

There are some very important things to notice here:

• Firstly, our route is now equal to an array. As a result of this, we need to put a closing array brace “)” at the end of our route function.
• Secondly, we have added a key/value pair of name/route’s_name. In this case, the name of this route is new_route.

Now, there are some benefits to using named routes. When we have a really long route name (think: ‘/our/really/long/route/name’), we want a short name that we can refer to it by when redirecting, or performing other URL related tasks. We could name this ‘long_route’, and simply refer to it as such.

For an example, we’re going to cover the Redirect library provided by Laravel, which allows us to send the user to other URLs very easily within our application.

Without using named routes, our redirect would look something like this:

'GET /redirect_url' => function()
{
	Redirect::to('/our/really/long/route');
},

Hmm, notice how long the URL is that we’re redirecting to? Wouldn’t it be handy if we could refer to just the name of the route? Luckily for us, we can!

Note: Don’t forget to create the route that we’re redirecting to, I’ll leave it to you to figure out (if you’re really stuck, leave a comment below). Make sure to remember the name!

Replace the above code with this:

'GET /redirect_url' => function()
{
	Redirect::to_long_route();
},

Much shorter, and easier to read, right? Convenience is huge when creating websites, and Laravel helps with this by providing a great amount of helper functions.

There’s always a great opportunity for discussion in the comments, so if you have any questions regarding the usage of Laravel, leave them below.

Today, we’ll be covering how to fix this problem by providing a solution for both Apache and nginx servers!

Apache Servers: .htaccess

On Apache servers, we need to create a .htaccess file with some Rewrite rules in it. You’ll need to place this in whatever directory Laravel is installed in, and place it in the root of that folder (e.g., not in the application directory, not in the public directory, but in the root).

Create a .htaccess file and paste this code into it:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
     RewriteEngine on

     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
     RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

     RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

This code will allow you to access any Laravel URL without the index.php in it. So for example, myapachesite.com/index.php/randomroute, would become myapachesite.com/randomroute. Much cleaner!

However, before we can do that, we must change a setting.

nginx Servers: nginx.conf

On nginx servers, we need to create a nginx.conf file with a rule in it. You’ll need to place this in whatever directory Laravel is installed in, and place it in the root of that folder (e.g., not in the application directory, not in the public directory, but in the root).

Create a nginx.conf file and paste this code into it:

try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php;

This code will allow you to access any Laravel URL without the index.php in it. So for example, mynginxsite.com/index.php/randomroute, would become mynginxsite.com/randomroute. Much cleaner!

However, before we can do that, we must change a Laravel setting.

Apache and nginx: Changing a Setting

Now that we’ve created the rewrite rules, we must change a setting in your application config to let Laravel know we’ve done so.

Open up application/config/application.php and scroll down to line 28. You should see this:

'index' => 'index.php',

Now that we’ve added either the .htaccess or the nginx.conf, we want to update this line to this:

'index' => '',

And we’re done! Now all routes URLs can be accessed without the index.php in them.

Thanks to Michael Owens in the comments for reminding me about doing this.

There’s always a great opportunity for discussion in the comments, so if you have any questions regarding the usage of Laravel, leave them below.

This is the first of a series of posts designed to help a newcomer to the Laravel PHP framework find their way around. By the time this series is through, we’ll know the ins and outs of this amazing little framework. Now, enough talk, let’s get to work!

1. Requirements

In order to get started with Laravel, we’re going to need to install it. In order to do this, you must have a PHP web server with version 5.3 or later installed. If you don’t have a web server, but still want to try out Laravel, I suggest XAMPP, a cross-platform, easy to use local web-server installer.

2. Installation

You’re going to need to download Laravel. To do this, head on over to laravel.com and click on the link that says “Download The Latest Version.”

Your download should start right away, and you should now have a zip file containing the framework’s files. Extract this file to it’s own folder, and rename this to laravel.

Now, you’ll need to put the laravel folder into your web server. In XAMPP, you’ll need to put this in the htdocs folder within your XAMPP installation’s folder. For me, it’s located at C:/xampp/htdocs on my Windows machine. So your htdocs folder should now have a folder named laravel within it, this is where the website resides.

With this complete, proceed to the next, and final, step!

3. Setup

Alright, now we want to open up the application’s config file. It’s located at application/config/application.php (inside of the laravel folder).

In order to get our application working, you’ll need to change the url config option, which currently says this:

'url' => ''

Currently it is pointing to nothing, but we want to change it to http://localhost/laravel/public if we’re using it on our local server. Don’t worry, I’ll explain this in further detail later on in this series.

That’s a Wrap!

That’s right, we’re done! This is all the setup required to configure a basic installation of Laravel.

If you visit http://localhost/laravel/public in your browser, you should see the default Welcome page of Laravel.

Bonus: Getting our Hands Dirty

Alright, let’s get our hands dirty with Laravel really quick. I’m not going to go in depth on what we’re doing here, that’ll come later (promise).

Open up application/routes.php, and scroll down until you see something like this:

'GET /' => function()
{
	return View::make('home.index');
},

This is the default route for the application, it is what is displaying that nice welcome message we saw before. This route is returning a View, which is essentially what users will see when using your application. You can remove that return statement for now, we’ll fill it back in later.

To finish, we’re just going to say “Hello World” in our route, and be off.

Add in the following line to your default route:

echo "Hello World!";

So now our route should be as follows:

'GET /' => function()
{
	echo "Hello World!";
},

Now, if you navigate to http://localhost/laravel/public, you should see “Hello World!” on your screen.

Normally we don’t echo out data directly in our routes, but usually provide a View for the user to interact with.

That’s all we have for today, next time we’ll cover Routes and Views more in depth.

There’s always a great opportunity for discussion in the comments, so if you have any questions regarding the setup or usage of Laravel, leave them below.

I recently got my hands on quite a nifty little PHP framework named Laravel by Taylor Otwell. It focuses on “staying true to the web with RESTful style routing,” which I have found to be a gift. Laravel makes putting my web app ideas into reality a dream.

Still sound cool? It should! Learn more after the jump.

Everything about Laravel is dead simple. There isn’t much fussing around wrapping your head around concepts, and it includes what you need to build powerful web apps, fast. When Taylor created it, he didn’t mess around. He kept it simple, and he was able to do that well. It doesn’t include a bunch of classes you’re unlikely to use, and everything about it works together seamlessly well.

So I’ve been using it to develop an app. Originally it was meant just to become familiar with the framework, but this has evolved into something I may actually try and put into production. I’ll explain the gist of the application, and it’s basic functionality. Eventually I may publish a “making of” tutorial series outlining it’s creation using Laravel (EDIT (9/17/2011): I’ve just started a series teaching a beginner to Laravel how to use the framework, eventually amounting to a website with similar capabilities as outlined here).

Overview

The goal of this application is to allow users to submit short bodies of text, which are then added to the database. They are by default, unapproved, and they have to be reviewed by a moderator before they are published to the public list.

The admin area is completely password protected, I’ve worked hard to ensure that I have CRSF protection, and I’m going to add form validation soon. I’m also going to flesh out admin, using some existing code that I created for registration to create new users.

The Laravel Experience

Laravel has been a breeze to work with, having amazing, well explained documentation rivaling in stature to that of Codeigniter’s.

Laravel also has very expressive syntax and class names, using REST based routing, which just makes sense given the way the web works. All of my code is comfortably human readable, especially compared to raw PHP, and I can also create it much faster, and using much less syntax. What previously took me many many lines in pure PHP now takes me much less using Laravel. The same can be said of any good framework, however Laravel provides a very lightweight solution, which provides me with what I need, and doesn’t load me up with plenty of classes I’ll never really use.

So, I encourage everyone who reads this article to go, try out Laravel here, and tell me what you think. If you enjoy it, I also really hope that you’ll tell Taylor about it in the Laravel Forums.

I’m currently revamping parts of the site, and I’m curious, how would you feel if I converted to Disqus comments, as opposed to my plain-old vanilla comments? Head on over there and look at some of the features.

Eventually I’d setup some of the Disqus features myself but, just for now, what’s your opinions? Leave a comment down below.

Thanks!

Starting from the basic groundwork, we will work our way up to crazy advanced ninja techniques, covering CSS3 and a variety of neat tips and tricks!

Interested? Read on for more!

Before we go into anything, we have to ask a question. What really is CSS? As you already know by the HTML tutorial (if you haven’t read that click here (insert link here) HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is what our site, and many other sites on the internet use to make the information look good. In essence what it applies a certain style to a selected element on a webpage. This creates a nice, clean, uniform look, that attracts possible customers to the site. So how is it done?

CSS has two main parts, being the selector, and one or more declarations. The selector is where the CSS file will apply to the webpage. The declarations are what the CSS file will do to the selected area. Some basic examples of what CSS can change include: Font Colour, Background Colour, Font, Text-Alignment. Using these attributes alone, talented designers and developers have been known to make some amazing typographical websites! But what about syntax?

The syntax for CSS is very simple to understand, provided you have a solid understanding of English. Here is a code block that demonstrates the ease of CSS syntax:

p

{

color: green;

text-align center;

}

This would turn the font colour green, and align the text in the centre of the webpage. Now, to apply this into an HTML document, we have to use the <style> attribute of HTML. It would look like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<html>

<head>

<style type="text/css">

p

{

color:green;

text-align:center;

}

</style>

</head>
<body>

<p>Welcome to ecustom.ca</p>

<p>What you're reading is formatted using CSS!</p>

</body>

</html>

In a webpage, it’d show up like this:

So that’s what basic CSS will do for you in HTML. Now, you don’t want to have all the CSS typing in the HTML file. The example that I just showed you is called internal file saving. Another option is to use an externall CSS file. To do this, you will first need to have a text editor that will edit in plain text. If you don’t have one of these, we recommend Notepad++ (Click Here), which is an editor with features such as syntax highlighting, code folding, and much more. This will allow you to save the file as a .css file. You will want to put your CSS code into this file, and then in your HTML document link to your CSS file like so:

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="yourfilenamehere.css" />
</head>

Make sure that if you are copy pasting this text, to replace the ‘yourfilenamehere.css’ with whatever your file name actually is. Now lets look at an example of a webpage styled using CSS. Here’s the HTML code:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

<html>

<head>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="yourfile.css" />
</head>
<body>
<p>

Hello there! This is a test of CSS! Make sure to contact us here at ecustom.ca!

<br />
bye-bye now!

</p>

</body>
</html>

Here is the CSS code:

p

{

color: blue;

text-align center;

}

And this is what it looks like:

These are the basics of CSS. To learn more, make sure you check out the next parts of the series (coming soon).

Any questions? Leave them in the comments below and either I or another writer will respond!

Read on to learn about three major endeavours that will be rolling out over our short-mid term future.

Ruby/RoR

Ruby is, put simply, an amazing language. Rails is, put simply, an amazing Ruby framework, and, bonus, it’s built for the web. These two factors alone, have propelled me to want to learn and develop skills in them both. Who knows? Maybe in a year from now, eCustom Solutions will be offering both RoR and PHP development.

Interested in following me on my journey? I’ll be posting sporadic updates on how the learning is going, and I’ll be sure to point to great community resources along the way.

CodeIgniter CMS

Another personal project of mine is the development of a brandable/customizable CodeIgniter CMS. It will be offered by eCustom Solutions, hopefully in the upcoming year, as a full-featured product that will come with installation services, training and ongoing tech support. Updates will also be provided free for one major revision after purchase, this too will include the features mentioned previously. After one major revision has passed, any future updates will be provided at 50% price, but support will become more limited.

This is a very tentative model, and it is greatly subject to change as we come closer to release (no date set as of yet).

Pre-Built Theme Files

Yes, they are all the rage right now amongst low-budget site owners, pre-built templates and themes. But nobody wants to have a plain-old vanilla theme that they may see the exact same version of on a different site, they want to have it customized! That’s why we will offer customization support with all of our themes, no matter the platform. Currently we are planning to release HTML/CSS templates, and WordPress themes for each of them as well!

Thanks for reading this month’s eCustom Solutions newsletter, be sure to check in next month for more exciting updates and news.

Have a great month!