Comments is a Laravel package. With it you can easily implement native comments for your application.

Comments can be used to comment on any model you have in your application.

All comments are stored in a single table with a polymorphic relation for content and a one-to-many relation for the user who posted the comment.

This package comes with a trait for models, so that you can easily access comments for the model/user. Also, whenever a comments is created, updated or deleted an event is fired.

The default frontend UI is built with React.js.

Here are a few screenshots.

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One comment edit form:

Two comments from different users:

I plan to expand this chapter with more tutorials and articles. If you write something about this package let me know, so that I can update this chapter.

Articles:

• Laravelista: Comments preview

• PHP version >=5.6.4

From the command line:

composer require laravelista/comments

Include the service provider in config/app.php:

'providers' => [
    ...,
    Laravelista\Comments\Providers\CommentsServiceProvider::class
];

Add auth.comments middleware in app/Http/Kernel.php under $routeMiddleware:

protected $routeMiddleware = [
    ...,
    'auth.comments' => \Laravelista\Comments\Http\Middleware\Authenticate::class,
];

And finally, append api/v1/* in app/Http/Middleware/VerifyCsrfToken.php so that it looks like this:

protected $except = [
    'api/v1/*'
];

We need to create the table for comments.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravelista\Comments\Providers\CommentsServiceProvider" --tag=migrations

php artisan migrate

First, add this code to your User model so that you can retrieve the comments for a user:

public function comments()
{
    return $this->hasMany(\Laravelista\Comments\Comments\Comment::class);
}

This is the first step to enabling comments on a model. Add trait Comments to any model that you want to be able to comment upon or get comments for.

Add the Comments trait to the model for which you want to enable comments for:

use Laravelista\Comments\Comments\Traits\Comments;

class Product extends Model
{
    use Comments;
}

In the config file you should specify:

• which models can be commented upon
• where is your User model located
• what is the path to your login page

Publish the config file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravelista\Comments\Providers\CommentsServiceProvider" --tag=config

Important! Make sure to enter content classes for models that can be commented upon in config/comments.php like so:

/**
 * Enter models which can be commented upon.
 */
'content' => [
    Laravelista\Lessons\Lesson::class,
    Laravelista\Archive\Post::class
],

Replace the classes from the sample above, with your own model classes.

The default UI is built with React.js and made for Bootstrap. You need to publish its assets in order for it to work correctly.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Laravelista\Comments\Providers\CommentsServiceProvider" --tag=public --force

You should run this command every time a new release of this package is released to keep the assets up to date.

In the view where you want to display comments, place this code and modify it:

@include('comments::comments-react', [
    'content_type' => App\Book::class,
    'content_id' => $book->id
])

In the example above we are setting the content_type to a App\Book model, which means that we are enabling comments on a book. We are also passing the content_id the id of the book so that we know to which book the comments relate to. Behind the scenes, the package detects the currently logged in user if any.

If you open the page containing the view where you have placed the above code, you should see a working comments form.

This package fires events to let you easily hook into it.

• Laravelista\Comments\Events\CommentWasPosted - this is where you would usually notify users who commented on the given model.
• Laravelista\Comments\Events\CommentWasUpdated
• Laravelista\Comments\Events\CommentWasDeleted

On my website Laravelista, whenever someone posts a comment on something, I send an email to everyone who posted on the same thing (except the user who posted the actual comment), to let them know that there is a new comment.

First you have to specify the event you want to listen to and the listener which will trigger when that event occcurs. Go to app/Providers/EventServiceProvider.php and append this code to the $listen array:

protected $listen = [
    ...,
    'Laravelista\Comments\Events\CommentWasPosted' => [
        'App\Listeners\SendEmailToUsersWhoCommentedOnGivenContent',
    ]
];

Then, from the command line run php artisan event:generate. This will create the necessary listener class in App/Listeners. Open the file app/Listeners/SendEmailToUsersWhoCommentedOnGivenContent.php and add this code:

public function handle(CommentWasPosted $event)
{
    $comment = $event->comment;
    $users = $comment->getUsersWhoCommented();

    foreach($users as $user)
    {
        // send email to each user
    }
}