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WebDevEtc M4Blog

Easy to install Laravel Package for adding a full blog (with admin backend) to your Laravel app

5 minutes to install! Quick and easy!

Introduction

This is WebDevEtc's M4Blog package. It has everything you need to quickly and easily add a blog to your laravel app.

FOR 5 MINUTE INSTALLATION GUIDE (with video guide), PLEASE VISIT THE INSTALL GUIDE HERE

Install guide • Packagist << MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW THE INSTURCTIONS. They're simple, but must be followed.

Features

• Includes all views, routes, models, controllers, events, etc
  • Public facing pages:
  • View all posts (paginated)
  • View all posts in category (paginated)
  • View single post
  • Add comment views / confirmation views
  • Search (full text search), search form, search results page.
  • Admin pages:
  • Posts (CRUD Blog Posts, Upload Featured Images (auto resizes)
    • View all posts,
    • Create new post,
    • Edit post,
    • Delete post
  • Categories (CRUD Post Categories)
    • View all categories,
    • Create new category,
    • Edit post,
    • Delete post
  • Comments (including comment approvals)
    • View all comments,
    • Approve/Moderate comment,
    • Delete comment
  • Upload images
    • as well as uploading featured images for each blog post (and auto resizing to multiple defined sizes), you can upload images separately.
    • view all uploaded images (in multiple sizes)
• Includes admin panel
  • Create / edit posts
  • Create / edit post categories
  • Manage (approve/delete) submitted comments
• Allows each blog post to have featured images uploaded (you can define the actual dimensions) - in large, medium, thumbnail sizes
• fully configurable via its config/m4blog.php config file.
• Includes all required view files, works straight away with no additional setup. All view files (Blade files) use Bootstrap 4, and very clean HTML (easy to get your head around). You can easily override any view file by putting files in your /resources/views/vendor/m4blog/ directory
• Built in comments (using the database), can auto approve or require admin approval (comment moderation).
  • Other options include using Disqus comments or disabling comments.
• Includes unit tests.
• Fires events for any database changes, so you can easily add Event Listeners if you need to add additional logic.
• < 5 minute install time and your blog is up and working, ready for you to go to the admin panel and write a blog post - see full details below, but this is a summary of the required steps:
  • install with composer,
  • do the database migration, copy the config file over (done with php artisan vendor:publish)
  • chmod/chown the public/blog_images/ directory so featured images can be uploaded for each blog post
  • and then add 1 method to your \App\User file (canManageM4BlogPosts()
  • but please see the install instructions to get everything up and working

What/who this package is for:

• For websites running Laravel (5.6)
• Who want to have a site blog, and have an easy to use interface to write blog posts/assign categories/manage existing posts
• Where only admin users can edit/manage the blog (this is not suitable for every user on your site to be able to manage posts)
• Where you understand that posts can (potentially) contain JS or any other code, so you should only allow trusted admin users to add/edit/delete/manage the blog posts

What this package is NOT for:

• Sites where you want your (normal, non-admin) users to write blog posts. You must set canManageM4BlogPosts() on your user model to ONLY allow trusted users.

Important notes

1) Anyone who can manage blog posts (defined by the canManageM4BlogPosts() method you add to your User model) can submit any HTML which is echoed out. This is a security issue. If you don't trust the content you should add a custom view and escape the blog content before echoing it, and set use_custom_view_files in the config to false.

2) if use_custom_view_files is enabled in the config (which it is by default), it means that any post with a custom view file set (details in the docs) can include any file within /resources/views/custom_blog_posts, which blade will execute. This package gives no method to edit any file within that directory though.

How to install M4Blog to your laravel app

Please see our M4Blog Laravel Blog Package Documentation/install guide for install instructions. (It is very simple - done via composer/artisan commands, plus adding one method to your \App\User model (canManageM4BlogPosts() which should return true if this user can manage the blog).

How to customise the blog views/templates

This is easy to do, and further detail can be found in our M4Blog Laravel Blog Package Documentation.

After doing the correct vendor:publish, all of the default template files will be found in /resources/views/vendor/m4blog/ and are easy to edit to match your needs.

Routes

It will auto set all required routes (both public facing, and admin backend). There are some config options (such as changing the /blog/ url to something else), which can be done in the m4blog.php file.

Config options

Please see the M4Blog config option documentation here for details.

All config options have comments which describe what they do. Please just refer to the m4blog.php file in your /config/ dir.

Events

You can find all the events that are fired by looking in the /src/Events directory.

Add these (and an Event Listener) to your EventServiceProvider.php file to make use of these events when they fire.

Built in CAPTCHA / anti spam

There is a built in captcha (anti spam comment) system built in, which will be easy for you to replace with your own implementation.

Please see our Captcha docs for more details.

TODO

This is a list of features or things that I want to eventually get round to adding

• Better UI for uploading images/viewing uploaded images
• Link uploaded images to blog post. At the moment they are not related.
• Allow users to remove a featured image from a blog post.
• Option to use HTMLPurifier to sanatise output.
• Better options for assigning post authors (currently it just assigns the currently logged in user). However, if site has 10,000+ users do we really want an UI interface for this? The alternative is to add something like a a is_admin field to the users table and only show admin users.
• Possibly add tags (we already have categories) but I am not sure how useful they really are, given that we already have categories.
• Pagination for comments on view single post? At the moment we limit it to a high number (default in config is 5000).
• RSS feed: shows from full (stripped tags) ->html of blog post (although has a setTextLimit() on it) - need to trim this, and if it uses custom view files then it should render that (without html).
• Email notification to admin when new comment is added
• RSS to use generate_introduction() for its contents.

Recent changes:

1) Added full text search and search views. You have to enable it in the config file (see latest config file) 2) Need more than the 3 default image sizes? Add more in the config/m4blog.php file, add the database column for it and it'll work!

Having problems, something is not working?

Image upload errors?

Try adding this to config/app.php:

'Image' => Intervention\Image\Facades\Image::class

• Also make sure that /tmp is writable. If you have open_basedir enabled, be sure to add :/tmp to its value.
• Ensure that /public/blog_images (or whatever directory you set it to in the config) is writable by the server
• You might need to set a higher memory limit, or upload smaller image files. This will depend on your server. I've used it to upload huge (10mb+) jpg images without problem, once the server was set up correctly to handle larger file uploads.

Version History

• 3.1 - minor fixes
• 3.0.3 - fixed RSS feed cache issue
• 3.0.2 - fixed default medium image size (changed to 600x400)
• 3.0.1 - replaced all short tags (<?) with full opening ones (<?php)
• 3.0 - Added separate functionality for uploading images (and save some meta data in db)
• 2.1 - added 'short_description' to db + form, and M4BlogPost::generate_introduction() method will try and use this to generate intro text.
• 2.0 - added full text search (enable it via the config file - it is disabled by default).
• 1.2 - added WYSIWYG, few smaller changes
• 1.1.1 - added basic captcha
• 1.0.5 - composer.json changes.
• 1.0 - First release
• 0.3 - Small changes, packagist settings.
• 0.1 - Initial release

Issues, support, bug reports, security issues

Please contact me on the contact from on WebDev Etc or on twitter and I'll get back to you asap.