How To Use

Menus can be registered anywhere in your application, but there is a special location for this purpose: resources/menus folder.

Each PHP in this file is auto-loaded and a $menu variable is injected to them.

$menu is just an instance of the Atorscho\Menus\Menu class singleton that allows you to register multiple navigation menus for your application.

Quick Start

After publishing vendor files, you may find new default.php file in resources/menus. This is just some sort of a boilerplate to get you started.

<?php

$menu->register('primary', 'Home Page', '/');

$menu->build('primary', function (Builder $builder) {
    $builder->add('Services', '/services');
    $builder->add('Products', '/products');
    $builder->add('Shop', '/shop')
            ->addChild('Categories', '/categories')
            ->addChild('Items', '/items');
});

This code creates a nested set of menu items:

-  Services
-  Products
-> Shop
  -> Categories
  -  Items

To render this in a Blade file:

<ul id="primary">
  @foreach(Menu::all('primary') as $item)
    <li {{ $item->active() }}>
      <a href="{{ $item->url }}">{{ $item->title }}</a>

      @if($item->hasChildren())
        <ul>
          @foreach($item->children() as $child)
            <li class="{{ $child->activeClass() }} item">
              <a href="{{ $child->url }}">
                {{ $child->title }}
              </a>
            </li> 
          @endforeach
        </ul>
      @endif
    </li>
  @endforeach
</ul>

You may also use app('menu') to retrieve Menu instance: app('menu')->primary as $item.

Features

Titles and URLs

Menu titles and URLs are automatically escaped.

You may use url() and route() helper functions to create links.

Child Items

Each menu item may have an infinite number of nested child elements.

Menu::register('secondary', 'Community', '#', [
  [
    'title'    => 'Forums',
    'url'      => url('forums'),
    'children' => [
      [
        'title' => 'Our Staff',
        'url'   => url('forums/staff')
      ],
      [
        'title' => 'Sitemap',
        'url'   => url('forums/sitemap')
      ]
    ]
  ]
]);

Now you may access to its child elements via the property: $item->children.

Custom Fields

Pretty often you need to add some information to the menu items, such as a counter, number of unread messages or an icon.

To do so, you can use "Custom Fields" that may be applied to every menu item.

Menu::build('admin', function (Builder $builder) {
  $builder->add('Categories', '/categories', [], ['count' => 23]);
  $builder->add('Users', '/users', [], ['count' => 691]);
});

Let's imagine we have injected a $menu = app('menu') variable to our Blade view:

<h3>Admin CP</h3>
<ul>
  @foreach($menu->admin as $item)
    <li>
      {{ $item->title }}

      <small>({{ $item->count }})</small>
    </li>
  @endforeach
</ul>

And the result will be:

Admin CP
————————
- Categories (23)
- Users (691)

Active State

Menu items usually have an "active" state, it means when the item is highlighted when the user is currently viewing that page.

For this purpose there is a couple of useful methods that will give the item this state.

Let's take our first example:

<ul id="primary">
  @foreach(Menu::all('primary') as $item)
    <li {{ $item->active() }}>
      <a href="{{ $item->url }}">{{ $item->title }}</a>
    </li>
  @endforeach
</ul>

An item has three methods:

• isActive()
• activeAttr()
• activeClass()

First one returns either true or false depending on current item's state.

The second one outputs an HTML attribute with "active" class name: class="active".

The last one simply returns "active" class name. It may be useful when you are adding it to already existing class attribute: <li class="{{ $item->activeClass() }} item">.

Nested Items

By default an item is always nested (this option may be changed in the configuration file config/menus.php).

Let's consider this navigation menu:

-  Home (/)
-  Products (/products)
-  Services (/services)
-> Forums (/forums)
  -> Members (/forums/members)
  -  Staff (/forums/staff)

If you open the "Members" page, then it is logical that its parent "Forums" should be active too. For this purpose there is a special custom field nested.

If you change it to false, then only the current item will be active.