Laravel Page Title best practices

When you're working with Laravel Application, ever wonder how to use a best practice to set the page title?

<title>{$pageTitle}</title>

Page Title is a must in order to SEO your pages. Also, with a full page title, users can know which tabs are what.

In real life, I've seen many lazy-application without a proper Page Title (only the brand name).

We're using PHP, a super dynamic language, and we got many ways to set the page title. But which one we should follow?

Bad practices

These practices below consider a bad practice to set a page title IMO.

Using view's variables

Probably many of us ever used (using) this way:

Controller:

<?php

class ArticleController extends Controller {
    public function viewArticleDetail(Article $article) {
        $pageTitle = $article->title . " - " . env('APP_NAME');
        return view('article.detail', compact('article', 'pageTitle'));
    }
}

View (Master Layout):

<title>{{$pageTitle}}</title>

It can be improved like this:

Controller:

$pageTitle = $article->title;

View (Master Layout):

<title>{{isset($pageTitle) ? $pageTitle . ' - ' . env('APP_NAME') : env('APP_NAME')}}</title>

Problems:

We shouldn't access the env in the Controllers either Views
Everytime we need the specific page title, we need to define the variable and pass it to the view.

Using @yield in Views

Many people suggested using this way also:

Master View:

<!--- This --->
<head>
    @yield('title')
</head>

<!--- or this --->
<title>@yield('title')</title>

So in your page's view, you can set the page title like this:

<!--- First way --->
@section('title')
    <title>{{__('...') . " - " . env('APP_NAME')}}</title>
@endsection

<!--- Second way --->
@section('title', __('...') . " - " . env('APP_NAME'))

Problems:

We shouldn't access the env in the Controllers either Views
Set page title for every pages is a pain in the ass
IMO: Hard to maintain, we have to go through all the views to set the page title

Best/Better Practice

I prepared for my application a simple class called PageTitle, stored it in app/Libraries

Basically, it just normal class with some static methods.

First, setting up the class

We only need to set up this method:

<?php
class PageTitle {
    /**
     * Get the postfix of the Page Title
     * @example <your title> - <post fix name here>
     * @example News - Google
     * @return string
     */
    protected static function getPostfixPageTitle() : string {
        // could be from config or env, your choice
        return __('Super Application');
    }

    //...
}

So in this getPostfixPageTitle, we can set up our postfix page title - mostly we're using our Brand Name:

Article A - My Brand Name
Index - My Branch Name
...

So within the method, we can use config or env or whatever you like, even retrieve the site name from DB.

We can set the page title in the Controller like this:

Use the PageTitle class

<?php
use App\Libraries\PageTitle;

class ArticleController extends Controller {
    public function viewArticleDetail(Article $article) {
        PageTitle::setPageTitle($article->title);
        return view('article.detail', compact('article'));
    }
}

Then in the Master View, simply declare title like this:

    <!-- Title -->
    <title>{{\App\Libraries\PageTitle::getTitle()}}</title>

So:

If there's page title set in the application => it will render Your Title - Your Postfix Name
If there's no page title => Your postfix name only

Why it's a good/best practices

Within a class, we can simply extend it in the future
- O of SOLID
Got a better way to compose the Postfix Name (like I said above, we can get from config or env or DB,...)
Easy to use, no need to pass any variables
Maintain should be easier because:
- Everytime we use the class, we will use the use keyword and make the Controllers/Services depend on that
  - We can search where PageTitle being used really fast
- 1 way only to set the page title across the Application
We can write tests for the PageTitle class

Conclusion

That's my way how I'm doing it for my Laravel application. How about yours?

Contribute

Fork it and send me a PR if you want to improve the content

Copyright

2021 by Seth Phat

sethsandaru / laravel-page-title