Check if you have php and composer installed. You can run this in a terminal (Powershell / Bash on windows)

php --version
# PHP 8.1.11 (cli) (built: Sep 29 2022 20:02:53) (NTS)
# Copyright (c) The PHP Group
# Zend Engine v4.1.11, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
#     with Zend OPcache v8.1.11, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

composer --version
# Composer version 2.4.3 2022-10-14 16:56:41

If not, you need to install both:

1. PHP: https://www.php.net/manual/en/install.php
2. Composer: https://getcomposer.org/download/

Laravel is a PHP framework that implements the MVC architecture pattern.

You can create a Laravel project like so:

composer create-project laravel/laravel poo-mvc-exercise

After the command successfuly creates a Laravel project, you will be able to run a local dev server with:

php artisan serve

To implement the basic features with Laravel you will need to work in the following folders:

• Routes: routes/web.php
• Models: app/Models
• Views: resources/views
• Controllers: app/Http/Controllers

You can follow a course online (English) about Laravel:

• https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-8-from-scratch

Note: artisan is php script installed with Laravel that will allow you to simplify a lot of actions.

You can use artisan to test features of php and Laravel in an interractive terminal: php artisan tinker

If you are using VS Code, you can install the following extensions:

• PHP Intelliphense
• Laravel Extra Intellisense

Optional:

• Laravel Blade Snippets

After each exercise, remember to commit your work before moving to the next. This will allow you to reset your work to a known state if you need to.

Steps:

• Create a new Laravel project if it is not done already: php create-project ... (see above)
• Open the project in VS Code
• Create a local git repository
• Commit your work with an "Initial commit"

In this exercise, we will first understand how Laravel works to display a simple landing page.

Steps:

• Go to routes/web.php to check the existing routes
• Modify the existing route for / to display a new view home
• Create a new view in resources/views/home.blade.php (You can make a simple page)

You can implement this using Routes only.

In this exercise we will try to create a really simple blog.

We want to have a page that lists all our posts:

• http://localhost/posts

A post can look like this:

<h1>My first blog post</h1>

<p>
    Anim irure mollit qui id veniam et ut dolor Lorem mollit ut. Minim velit est anim esse nulla proident non consectetur officia. In Lorem est amet labore commodo laboris veniam reprehenderit ullamco labore elit. Consectetur reprehenderit culpa minim qui cupidatat irure ut fugiat velit reprehenderit incididunt sit ad anim.
</p>

You can implement this using Routes and Views only.

We now have a page http://localhost/posts that is able to display all our blog posts.

However we would like to have a single page per blog posts to make easier to add more and more posts.

We want to have a single dynamic route that will display the post given in the URL:

• http://localhost/posts/my-first-post

The blog posts will be stored on the disk, in a folder that we will create: resources/posts/:

• resources/posts/my-first-post.html
• resources/posts/my-second-post.html
• resources/posts/my-third-post.html

The http://localhost/posts should link to those pages.

When the blog post doesn't exist, you can return a 404 error to the browser.

You can implement this using Routes and Views only.

In this exercise, we will improve the existing blog mechanism by creating a model Post that will find the post files for us.

Steps:

• You can create a Post class in a file called app/Models/Post.php
• Implement a static method Post::find($post) that will return the content of the post
• Modify the existing route http://localhost/posts/my-first-post to use this Post model

You can use artisan to create the model: php artisan make:model Post

You can implement this using Routes, Models and Views only.

In this exercise, we will improve the existing blog mechanism by using the model Post to list all our posts on the http://localhost/posts page.

Steps:

• You can create a static method Post::all() that will list the posts from the disk
• Modify the existing route http://localhost/posts to use this Post model

To be able to list the files on disk, you can use the File facade from Laravel: use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;

You can implement this using Routes, Models and Views only.

In this exercise, we will improve the list of posts by using a metadata in our blog posts files (my-first-post.html).

This metadata is call YAML front matter.

Steps:

• Import the package using composer
• Add metadata to all our blog posts
• Improve the existing http://localhost/posts using the package to display post Titles, Date, Author, Extract

You can implement this using Routes, Models and Views only.

In this exercise, we will group all the actions that can happen on our posts inside a Controller.

Steps:

• Create a controller for the posts: PostController
• Implement a static method list($post) to handle listing our posts
• Implement a static method show() to handle showing a single post

You can use artisan to create the controller: php artisan make:controller PostController

So far we have stored articles locally and we are only able to write them in a text editor.

To make the application more dynamic, we could add some features:

• Add a category to each post and a way to display them on a page for each category
• A search bar to filter the articles
• A Database to store our posts
• A Form that allows creating new posts