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Layout Bricks for Magento

All in all you're just another brick in the layout

Modern frontend frameworks embrace reusable components, like buttons, input fields, and cards. And they style them with utility CSS like Tailwind. It's fine to pile a dozen classes on that primary button, because you only have to build it once.

Magento doesn't come with this out of the box. Many templates are huge and if you talk about UI components people make the sign of the cross XML at you.

This package is a way to make things better. To use small anonymous components without hassle. It's heavily inspired by Laravel's anonymous blade components. In Magento, our unit of frontend template is a block. An anonymous block is a brick.

An example phtml template

How does it work?

The $mason object is globally injected into every .phtml template. It has just one method, __invoke(), to cause it to output as a string a fully rendered child block. So it's essentially a compact, ergonomic way of doing this:

This is already nice, because we are now still using Magento's templating engine:

• We can call small templates without using a ton of boilerplate. It's now realistic to make a template for something as small as a single button. So we can re-use the same button look and feel throughout the entire website. This is really helpful if the button actually has a LOT of utility CSS classes. Hi Tailwind.
• We can make a library of base components as a reusable module.
• We still have the opportunity to use Magento's theme overrides. We can change the way buttons look in a website or single store. But because we're re-using the button template everywhere, we can change it in one place and have the change happen everywhere.

But there's more:

• You can set default HTML attributes (such as classes) on a component, and inject additional ones based on the context. They will be merged, with new properties overriding default ones.
• You can inject props into a component, supplying them with data.

For example, consider the cms.block brick:

This will render the CMS block with ID 'text-block', but surround it in a div with a gray round border.

Aliases

Aliases in detail

You can place bricks in two ways:

• Fully cite the Magento template path:

• Create an alias for it, so you can refer to it more shortly:

Aliases in detail

Attributes

Attributes in detail

The $mason objects invoke method accepts an array of attributes. For example:

In the brick template, this will be available as a BrickAttributesBag which could for example have the following default attributes/values:

This would result in the following HTML after the defaults and your custom input is merged:

Attributes in detail

Props

Props in detail

Props are used to pass data to the brick. For example, if you were making a brick to render a "product card", you'd pass the product that needs to be displayed:

In the brick template, the props are available through the $props variable, which is automatically present:

The $props variable is not an array, but it implements ArrayAccess to give access to its contents.

The $props variable also has a $props->default([]) method so you can supply default (scalar) props. You can always override those default from the parent template.

The $props object also has a $props->expect([]) method which allows you to specify expected props and their data types so you can opt into greater type safety.

Props in detail

Escaper

Using $escaper to filter raw output of data from the DB or user input is important to protect against various attacks. Official documentation about this.

However, the output from $mason() is the output of another block that already produces HTML. So the call to $mason() should NOT be escaped, but inside the PHTML template implementing your brick, you should use it normally.

Empty PHTML brick template

Just copy paste this into a file and start designing:

Corrivate

(en.wiktionary.org)

Etymology

From Latin corrivatus, past participle of corrivare ("to corrivate").

Verb

corrivate (third-person singular simple present corrivates, present participle corrivating, simple past and past participle corrivated)

(obsolete) To cause to flow together, as water drawn from several streams.