Cells for Laravel 4 - Beta

Cells are view components for Laravel 4. They are mini-controllers with their own MVC stack, can invoke logic and render views.

Installation

• Cells on GitHub

To get the latest version of Cells simply require it in your composer.json file.

"torann/cells": "dev-master"

You'll then need to run composer install to download it and have the autoloader updated.

Once Cells is installed you need to register the service provider with the application. Open up app/config/app.php and find the providers key.

'providers' => array(

    'Torann\Cells\CellsServiceProvider',

)

Cells also ships with a facade which provides the static syntax for creating collections. You can register the facade in the aliases key of your app/config/app.php file.

'aliases' => array(

    'Cells' => 'Torann\Cells\Facades\CellsFacade',

)

Create configuration file using artisan

$ php artisan config:publish torann/cells

Creating a cell

You can create a cell using artisan command:

php artisan cells:create demo

The parameter is the cell name.

Now you will see a controller class at /app/cells/CellDemo.php and view at /app/cells/demo/display.blade.php

Rendering

Using the Blade helper

@cell('demo', 'display')

• The first parameter is the cell name.
• The second parameter is the view type, by default it is "display".

Calling your cell in a view and passing Demo Cell! as the label

echo Cells::get('demo', 'display', array('label' => 'Demo Cell!'));

Caching

Cells can be cached based on minutes. Simple change the $cache variable in the cell controller to the number of minutes the cell should be cached.

class CellDemo extends CellBaseController {

    /**
     * Default cache value in minutes.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    public $cache = 60;

}

By default caching is disabled in the local environment. To enable this change the setting disable_cache_in_dev to false in the config file.