PHP MVC understanding help (Laravel 5.3) - php

Question

First, I want to say that it's the first time for me working
with a PHP Framework and MVC and I have not found all the answers to my problems yet. I'm using Laravel 5.3 at the moment.
Problem:
I have a website where a User can login and a few pages (I'm using Laravel Auth) and on a lot of pages I have a sidebar which is every time the same. Then I have on every page some content which is different (about, articles, ...). I heard that the most important thing is that you should never write code twice and there is the problem. On this sidebar there is a "service" which show content to the user but to show this I have an algorithm which needs the user data from the authenticated user and the Auth function is not available in Laravel 5.3 ServiceProvider or BaseController and was never meant to be.
My question now is how can I do that cleanly?
Some codes to understand it better:
Routes:
Route::get('/community/ranking', 'Pages\RankingController#getView');
Route::get('/community/advertising', 'Pages\AdvertisingController#getView');
Route::get('/logout', 'PagesController#doLogout');
Route::get('/home', 'Pages\HomeController#getView');
Then I have for every page an own controller which serves the content for this page (except of the sidebar - no solution yet).
HomeController:
<?php
namespace App\Http\Controllers\Pages;
use App\Http\Controllers\BaseController;
use Redis;
use App\Http\Requests;
use Request;
use Shoutbox;
use User;
class HomeController extends BaseController
{
function getView()
{
$shoutboxData = $this->getShoutboxData();
return view('pages.home', compact('shoutboxData'));
}
private function getShoutboxData()
{
$shoutbox = Shoutbox::orderBy('time', 'DESC')->skip(0)->take(15)->get();
if(count($shoutbox) > 0)
{
foreach($shoutbox as $entry)
{
$getUser = User::where('id', '=', $entry->user_id)->first();
$entry['username'] = $getUser->username;
$entry['look'] = $getUser->look;
$shoutboxData[] = $entry;
}
}
else
{
$shoutboxData = null;
}
return $shoutboxData;
}
public function systemMessage()
{
$redis = Redis::connection();
$redis->publish('chat.message', json_encode([
'msg' => 'System message',
'nickname' => 'System',
'system' => true,
]));
}
}
Now I serve the view in each, own controller and the content of this page (for example shoutbox, news) is also in that controller. (Not very clean in my opinion but didnt find any better way. Something I can improve here?).
I can serve the sidebar content on every Controller but this is not what I want. How can I do that? Am I using MVC right?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Because you're using the Laravel Blade template system you can split your view logic out into separate blade files.
Your sidebar is common to every page so put this in your layout file (resources/views/layouts/app.blade.php) put the logic before
<div class="container" id="app">
#yield('content')
</div>
Now in your blade files for each individual page just extend the layout template you just created:
#extends('layouts.app')
#section('content')
<h1>page content goes here</h1>
#endsection
Now everyone of your blade files which extend the layouts.app will have the sidebar logic in them.
EDIT: With the extra information provided.... do as I said above but also create a view composer, you can find the full documentation here: https://laravel.com/docs/5.3/views#view-composers
Create a view composer for your main layout (or sidebar layout if you're going to be extending layouts instead) and pass your data within the view composer, the documentation gives good examples so just modify that for your own sidebar.