How to auto-load Blade layouts

Last weekend my mate Dave Shoreman figure it out how to use the Blade template engine from Laravel outside the framework. For me that was awesome and I started using it with CodeIgniter right away. After a few tests and seeing that everything was working it was time to start tweaking things.

I never used any template library before Blade. I just didn’t like any. So I always use Jamie Rumbelow’s way of using views with his MY_Controller.php configuration. 

This configuration is strongly driven by the ideals of convention over configuration, favoring simplicity and consistency over configuration and complexity.

Assume you have a controller called products with the following methods: index, by_category, detail.

Using Jamie’s way you are going to end up with a view folder like this:

VIEWS
  →products
    →index.php
    →by_category.php
    →detail.php
  →layouts
    →application.php

I actually like this structure. This way you always have to follow a pattern and it’s way easier to know where is everything.

Also not having to load views in every controller method is great:

$this->load->view('foo');

When I started using Blade I wanted to follow the same structure using blade layouts. Also I didn’t want to manually echo the blade views. 

I wrote something based on Jamie’s code.

Using this you don’t have to define a layout in your MY_Controller since with blade you can extend your blade files to layouts.

If by any chance you have a method that you don’t want to auto-load any blade files, and you want to load them yourself instead, you can do it.

Pretty cool right?