2025 UPDATE

We have updated this blog post to include the new features available up to 2025 since its original publication in 2020.

A PHP templating engine for Laravel

Blade is a great templating engine included with Laravel, a popular PHP framework for web development. While there are many PHP templating engines like Twig, Smarty, Dwoo, Volt, Plates, Mustache, and Latte, Blade stands out because it lets you use plain PHP code in its templates. This guide will look at why Blade is good, especially when used with Jigsaw, to make unique dynamic static sites.

Making front-end development better

Blade changes how developers work on the front-end. If you’ve made websites with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you’ll find Blade’s templating fresh and helpful. It makes building websites faster and easier.

Think about how hard it is to keep a menu the same on different pages. Usually, you’d have to change each page by hand, which takes a lot of time and can lead to mistakes. Blade makes it easier by letting you use ’partials’.

Enhancing front-end development with Blade

Blade revolutionizes front-end development by introducing a more efficient and organized approach to creating web interfaces. The use of partials and components in Blade allows developers to reuse code snippets across multiple pages, reducing redundancy and improving maintainability. For instance, a navigation menu can be defined once in a partial and easily included wherever needed, ensuring consistency and saving valuable development time.

Understanding Blade templates

Blade templates do more than just components; they change how you develop with Laravel. With PHP 8.3 out, Laravel Forge servers are set up to use the newest PHP features, so your Blade templates are up-to-date with web technology.

How partials work

Partials are bits of code you write once and then include in your web app wherever needed. For example, write a ’menu partial’ once, and then add it to any page that needs the menu with just one line of code. This works for footers, sidebars, or any repeated pieces of code. Blade lets developers make a main layout with basic parts, which can be added to new pages easily, keeping things the same and saving time.

Making PHP simpler with Blade’s directives

Blade’s main strength is how it makes adding PHP to your templates easy. To show a variable or array from a previous URL is as simple as writing {{ $my_variable }} in your Blade file, and Blade takes care of the rest.

Blade’s @foreach directive is a great example of its power, making it easy to add HTML and PHP variables in loops, which can be neatly closed with @endforeach. This is very helpful for iterating over data, such as displaying items in a shopping cart or listing blog posts.

Blade’s directives also significantly reduce the complexity of PHP functions like loops, conditional statements, and more, making your code cleaner and more maintainable.

Enhancing security with Blade’s built-in features

Security is very important in web development, and Blade has features to help, like the @csrf directive. This makes a special token for forms to make sure they come from your site and helps protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.

Laravel and Blade also support other HTTP methods like PUT, PATCH, and DELETE, not just GET and POST. You can use these easily with Blade’s form directives, making your web apps safer and better.

Integrating JavaScript with Blade

Blade works well with JavaScript frameworks and lets you use tools like Alpine.js without trouble. Blade can also turn data into JSON safely to start JavaScript variables.

Blade is flexible, including with how it uses JavaScript. Not every webpage needs JavaScript, and Blade lets you choose where and when to include JavaScript in your layout. Whether it’s in the head or body of your main layout, Blade stacks let you add JavaScript code only to the pages that need it, making your site run faster and better.

Furthermore, Blade’s compatibility with static site generators such as Jigsaw opens up new possibilities for building fast and efficient static sites, combining the best of both worlds. In our next post, we will explore the benefits of using Blade with Jigsaw for building powerful static sites.

Conclusion

Blade is a powerful templating engine that significantly enhances the front-end development process within Laravel. Its ability to use plain PHP code, coupled with its intuitive directives and components, makes it an essential tool for developers. By simplifying tasks and integrating smoothly with other tools, Blade elevates the development experience, ensuring that web applications are both efficient and secure.

This article is part of our ongoing series, "Which technologies do we use and why?", where we explain the technologies that we use on a daily basis and the reasons behind our choices.

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