Laravel menu builder package

A simple menu builder package for Laravel 5.x

Installation

Composer

This package can be installed via Composer. Run the following from the command line:

$ composer require martinbean/laravel-menu-builder

Usage

The menu builder consists of two models: Menu and MenuItem. A Menu has many MenuItem instances, and a MenuItem morphs itself to the models in your application. Therefore, you need to do some linking up to get the menu builder working.

Say you have a Page model. You will need to implement the Navigatable interface like so:

<?php namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use MartinBean\MenuBuilder\Contracts\Navigatable as NavigatableContract;

class Page extends Model implements NavigatableContract
{
    protected $table = 'pages';
}

Adding the interface means you then need to implement two methods on your model class. These methods are getTitle() and getUrl().

In your theoretical Page model, this can be implemented simply like this:

<?php namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use MartinBean\MenuBuilder\Contracts\Navigatable as NavigatableContract;

class Page extends Model implements NavigatableContract
{
    protected $table = 'pages';

    public function getTitle()
    {
        return $this->title;
    }

    public function getUrl()
    {
        return route('page.show', [$this->slug]);
    }
}

For getTitle() we’re simply returning the value of the model’s title attribute; and for getUrl() we return a route using Laravel’s route() helper.

The interface means you can make any of your existing models into a menu item, so long as they expose a title and a URL. This makes the menu builder flexible, and akin to the one in WordPress (which inspired this package) where menu items can be a post, page, category etc.

Rendering menus

Rendering of menus are done via presenter classes. This means you can change how menus are rendered by creating new presenters.

Out of the box, the package comes with a UnorderedListPresenter class. As the name suggests, this renders the menu in a plain ol’ HTML unordered list (<ul>) element.

You can create your own presenters: all you need to do is implement the Presenter contract, which will enforce you to implement three methods:

• render()
• hasItems()
• getItems()

Your presenter should also have a constructor that takes an Menu instance as a parameter.

Take a look at the UnorderedListPresenter class source for an example of how to implement these methods.

Displaying menus in your templates

The Menu model is added to Laravel’s container and exposed via a facade, making it available in your templates. To render a menu, you can simply call:

{!! Menu::build(1) !!}

Where the first parameter is the ID (primary key value) of the menu you wish to render. There is also an optional second parameter which is the presenter class you wish to use if you don’t want to use the default UnorderedListPresenter class.

CRUD

You’ll also need to implement your own CRUD routines for building menus.

Issues

If you have any problems with this package, create a new Issue.

License

Licensed under the MIT License.