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Handlebars

Introduction

Supercharge uses the Handlebars template rendering engine to translate your views into HTML. Handlebars is extensible by default allows you to build complex layouts. Starting from a base layout, you may add partial views to ultimately compose the final HTML.

Supercharge supports Handlbars files using the .hbs file extension and automatically picks up all the view files located in the resources/views directory.

Supercharge Layout Presets

A new Supercharge application ships with a Bootstrap 4 layout preset. This preset contains a base layout and partial views for navigation and footer.

The bootstrap layout preset has various benefits: it improves the webiste aesthetic, makes a good first impression when starting to work with Supercharge, and most important: it provides you a solid starting point using a sophisticated CSS framework.

Base Layouts

Designing websites can be cumbersome without base layouts because you would repeat the overall layout in every view. That’s where base layouts help you out. A base layout is the default HTML structure where you’re adding the actual page content. Base layouts in Supercharge are located in the resources/views/layouts directory.

Imagine the follolwing example to get a grasp on base layouts. Your website may have three pages: startpage, blog, and about. All three pages use the same base styling with a navigation on top and a footer at the site’s bottom. The only thing you’re changing on each page is the actual content.

A base layout provides you with the structure to put a navigation on top, the footer at the bottom and a content placeholder in-between.

Adding a Layout

A Supercharge application ships with a default “app” layout located at resources/views/layouts/app.hbs. Adding a new base layout is straightforward. Add a new layout file in resources/views/layouts and you can use it in your application.

Let’s say you want a dedicated landing page layout with a hero unit. Such a base layout could look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>

<head>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/style.css">
</head>

<body>

    {{> hero }}

    <div class="container" role="main">
        <div class="row">
            {{{ content }}}
        </div>
    </div>

    {{> footer }}

</body>

</html>

As you can see in the markup, the base layout uses the hero and footer partial views to inject the content from these templates. The hero view may contain a navigation partial view as well.

Partials

Superchare automatically loads all Handlebars helpers located in the resources/views/partials directory. Partials are partial views containing HTML sections for sections on your website. Typically, the navigation of your website layout is a partial view:

<nav class="navbar navbar-expand-md navbar-light bg-white border-bottom">
    <div class="container">

        {{> logo }}

        {{> nav/nav-center}}

        {{> nav/nav-right}}

    </div>
</nav>

The navigation partial may then provide the basic structure, like the brand on the left and links on the right. The navigation partial itself may reference other partials, like a logo partial, or nav-center and nav-right partials.

Helpers

Superchare automatically loads all Handlebars helpers located in the resources/views/helpers directory. Handlebars supports two types of helpers: plain and block helpers.

Plain helpers are regular handlebars expressions and look like a variable accessor, for example:

<form method="POST">
    {{csrf}}

    …
</form>

In contrast, block helpers are expressions starting with # and provide a structured block, for example:

<div>
    <h2>
        {{#if name}}
            Hello {{name}}
        {{else}}
            Hello my friend
        {{/if}}
    </h2>
</div>

Handlebars itself ships with helpers to conveniently render dynamic views. Also, Supercharge provides you a handful of Handlebars helpers.