Helpers
The front-end makes use of a utility class (specified in the forum.frontend.utility_class
config value) to facilitate a few common actions. This is automatically aliased to Forum
for ease of use in views.
Alert
Forum::alert('success', 'categories.updated', $categories->count());
Flashes alert messages to the session to be displayed on the next request. Note that validation messages are independent of this and follow Laravel’s convention; in this context, alerts are forum-specific ‘success’ or ‘warning’ messages.
Render
Forum::render($post->content);
Parses the given content and returns the “rendered” version. This is used for post content by default, but could extend to category descriptions.
Route
Forum::route('forum.index');
Forum::route('thread.show', $thread);
Wraps Laravel’s route()
helper function to generate URLs for forum routes. Since forum front-end routes contain many parameters, generating URLs for them with route()
can be cumbersome, especially in views. To make this easier, Forum::route()
simply accepts a route name (with or without the preceding forum.
) and a Category
, Thread
or Post
model. The route parameters are automatically extracted from the model.
Routes
Forum::routes(Router $router);
Defines all of the standard routes. By default, if forum.routing.enabled
is true, this is automatically called inside a route group with ‘prefix’, ‘as’ and ‘middleware’ set to forum.routing.prefix
, forum.routing.as
and forum.frontend.middleware
respectively.
Tip: You can disable routing and call this in your own route definitions if you prefer; just remember to set the ‘as’ property of any forum route group you define to
forum.routing.as
, otherwiseForum::route()
may be unable to identify forum routes correctly.
Slugify
Forum::slugify($title);
Generates a URL-friendly version of the given string. By default, this simply passes the string through Laravel’s str_slug()
and is used by Forum::route()
. You’ll probably want to override this if your forum is going to contain categories and threads with unicode titles.