Using Laravel Packages

Since I have multiple sites that use almost the same code I have been trying to consolidate shared code into Laravel packages for ease of maintenance. This weekend I did my second package which is escuccim/sitemap which contains my code for generating XML sitemaps for Google. Since I have this site available in more than one language and I use subdomains to set the default language it made for very messy and confusing hardcoded sitemaps. I was able to shrink the code for each sitemap down from hundreds of lines to about 50 by putting the subdomains and the corresponding language in a DB table and then looping through them to output the URLs and hreflang tags in the sitemap. This time the process of writing the package was quick and easy using the same method that I struggled with last time.

Once I had that working I went back to my LaraBlog package which I added translation functionality to. I had one big problem which took me a while to figure out which was that it wasn't loading the translations at all, it was just displaying the key: 'escuccim::blog.key'. I researched this and found no answers, but was able to solve it by changing the namespace or hint to larablog. I am not sure why this worked, but I suspect it may be because I was using the namespace escuccim for the views and maybe they conflicted? Anyway if anyone else is having this issue try to change the namespace/hint.

When I had the blog package translating properly I deleted the code I was using for this site for the blog and the sitemap and replaced it with the new packages. So far everything seems fine, but I will give it a day or two before to turn up any issues before I start using the packages in other places. 

I have a few other things I want to put into packages, and I just have to say that Composer makes my life so much easier! Instead of having to go through my code line by line to copy changes from one place to another while avoiding any functionality that differs from one project to the next I just update the package and then composer does the rest!