Before installing Voyager it is very important to take a quick moment to learn what it is & what it isn't.

What it is

• An admin interface for your Laravel app

• An easy way to add/edit/delete data for your app

• A menu builder (build menus in Voyager for your app)

• A media manager for your files

• CRUD/BREAD generator (learn more about BREAD here)

Voyager is simply an admin for your Laravel app. Whatever you want your app to do on the front-end is completely up to you. You are in control of your application and you can use Voyager to make your life easier by adding data, editing users, creating menus, and many other administrative tasks.

What it isn't

• A content management system (CMS)

• A blogging platform

• Wordpress (Bleh! 😜)

Voyager is not a CMS or a blogging platform. But it can be used to create a CMS or a blogging platform, but out of the box it is neither of those. As stated in the previous section you have full control on what your application will do and how it will function.

With Laravel & Voyager you can create any kind of application your heart desires. Laravel & Voyager are simply tools to make it easier to build.

Formfields are the hearth of Voyagers BREAD-system. Each formfield represents a field in your database-table and one input (or output) in BREAD. To tweak your formfields you can insert JSON options which are described in the following pages.

All formfields share a handful options:

Description

All types can include a description in order to help your future self or other users using your Voyager admin panel to understand exactly what a specific BREAD input field is for, this can be defined in the Optional Details JSON input field:

{
    "description": "A helpful description text here for your future self."
}

Display options

There are also a few options that you can include to change the way your BREAD is displayed. You can add a display key to your json object and change the width of the particular field and even specify a custom ID.

{
    "display": {
        "width": "3",
        "id": "custom_id"
    }
}

The width is displayed on a 12-grid system. Setting it with a width of 3 will span 25% of the width.

The id will let you specify a custom id wrapper around your element. example:

<div id="custom_id">
    <!-- Your field element -->
</div>

Default value

Most formfields allow you to define a default value when adding an entry:

{
    "default" : "Default text"
}

Null Values

You might want to save an input field into the database as a null value instead of an empty string.

Simply enough, inside the BREAD you can include the following Optional Details for the field:

{
    "null": ""
}

This will turn an empty string into a null value. However you might want to be able to add both an empty string and a null value to the database for that field. However you have to choose a replacement for the null value, but it can be anything you wish. For example, if you want a field to change a string (ex. Nothing) into a null value you could include the following Optional Details for that field:

{
    "null": "Nothing"
}

Now entering Nothing into the field will end up as a null value in the database.

Generating Slugs

Using the bread builder you may wish to automatically generate slugs of a certain input. Lets say you have some posts, which have a title and a slug. If you want to automatically generate the slug from the title attribute, you may include the following Optional Details:

{
    "slugify": {
        "origin": "title",
        "forceUpdate": true
    }
}

This will automatically generate the slug from the input of the title field. If a slug does already exists, it will only be updated if forceUpdate is set enabled, by default this is disabled.

Custom view

You can specify a custom view to be used for a formfield. To do so, you have to specify the view attribute for your desired field:

{
    "view": "my_view"
}

This will then load my_view from resources/views instead of the formfield.

You get plenty of data passed to your view for you to use:

• $view can be browse, read, edit, add or order

• $content the content for this field

• $dataType the DataType

• $dataTypeContent the whole model-instance

• $row the DataRow

• $options the DataRow details

Before installing Voyager make sure you have installed one of the following versions of Laravel:

• Laravel 6

• Laravel 7

• Laravel 8

Additionally Voyager requires you to use PHP 7.3 or newer.