Laravel Collective

Introduction to Laravel Collective

Laravel Collective is an html component which is used to build view elements instead of the simple html tags. It is used to make html forms with the help of shortcodes. By default, Html codes require a lot of time to be produced. If you need to create a website with a lot of elements like text boxes, checkbox fields, text area, and drop-down lists, writing raw HTML code in a single blade together with blade syntax may end up consuming a lot of time of the developer when it is possible to make it happen in less time. Laravel Collective is a complete package and it can be easily integrated with any project of laravel 5.0. It is one of the popular names in the market and is surely a very good template engine. It has got ample benefits to be used for many purposes.

What is Laravel Collective?

It is a special set of elements that can be used for HTML forms. Some of the examples of elements are checkboxes, radio buttons, labels, etc. Additionally, it also has command bus, remote SSH and annotations for other specific purposes. When you open any form it allows you to give it a route. The action and the method it uses are defined on the given route by the blade.

With the help of the blade, you can easily create view composers and macros. In case you need to write a multilingual application, blade and laravel come with the necessary facilities and methods you will require to achieve your task for the same. All the resources of the Laravel collective are accessible through github for which the link you can find on the website. The latest version available is Laravel Collective v6.03. It is needed that you install and deploy the Laravel framework appropriately to get Laravel collective working.

It does the rendering and processing work of the submitted content into HTML Form tags to code the elements which one may need. When Laravel 5 was introduced into the market a few of the components were excluded from the core Framework of Laravel and were dedicated to the hand of Laravel Collective. One of the primary additions to the Laravel Collective was the Forms and HTML library. Some experts claim that it is not that necessary to work on any of the form buildings as it is counted as not that relevant but it is a popularly used product by many companies and businesses around the world.

Collectives in Laravel Collective

There is less pain in writing codes when using Laravel Collective compared to direct HTML codes for any kind of work. Also, the form facade makes select fields very less painstaking. The following packages which were excluded from the main framework of Laravel are included in Laravel Collective.

1. laravelcollective/annotations: These help to use annotations in the PHP Docblocks for further processing.

2. laravelcollective/html: These help in delivering HTML Form and HTML conveniences with the help of HTML builder and Form builder.

3. laravelcollective/remote: It permits to SSH into the remote servers and also runs the particular command with the help of SSH facade.

4. laravelcollective/iron-queue: It ensures and makes sure that there is IronMQ support for the Laravel queue.

5. laravelcollective/bus: It makes sure that there is the delivery of functionality of Laravel Command Bus.

How to install a particular package?

Let us look at how to install a particular package. If you want to install laravelcollective/html package, follow these steps:

• You need to install the package by running the composer command in the project directory.
• Add the new provider to the particular provider’s array of config/app.php
• You need to then add two class aliases to the aliases array of config/app.php

Now you can use the form and also html helper as per your interest. There are sample usages available in form helper to assist you in creating a form with the help of the Laravel collective which is laravelcollective/html package. Form model binding is one of the important works that people do with the help of this resource. The creator of Laravel who hosted Laravel collective is no more maintaining it which also helps us understand that there are a lot of glitches and delay in updates which don’t improve the use of it as and when necessary.

Also, there are a lot of people who claim that it is not really necessary as there are many other alternate options available in the market. Also, the popular claim is that if the particular form you are creating is simple, with very few components then it makes sense to use it. If there are few elements in your form and they are identical, then using the Laravel Collective will be beneficial for sure. The form builder makes things easier. Similarly, like how we saw the installation of the html package, you can install all the other packages available in the Laravel Collective which can be used for your different purposes.

The other packages are specifically designed to assist in the many other technicalities which need to be attended to. The main purpose of introducing this was to make sure that it makes coding html content convenient and easier for all those involved in the work. Though there are opinions in support of it and also not in support of it one can never come to any conclusion unless one uses it. Therefore it is important to first use it and realize if it is really helping or not helping in any way. Some also complain that the final outcome of the coding with the help of Laravel Collective does not define the errors and therefore it becomes a complication to identify and understand the errors and work on them to make sure everything is fine in the end.

Conclusion

It is a popularly used method to ease the work of detailed html coding and has been in the market for long now. Many specialists have analyzed it and have made various conclusions based on their timely observations. There are people who have benefitted with time and efforts in regards to use of Laravel Collective and there are others who find it not really helpful as they claim that it has major limitations in its complete processing which can lag the process of completion of the given work in time. Therefore, unless one uses it, it is difficult to credit or discredit it.

This is a guide to Laravel Collective. Here we discuss the basic concept, how to install a particular package and Collectives which are included in Laravel Collective. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Laravel Commands
2. What is Laravel Framework?
3. Laravel Crud Generator
4. Laravel Dashboard