This blog was born from my idea to create a straightforward markdown-based blog using Laravel. While searching online, I often came across pre-built packages that were either overloaded with unnecessary features or didn’t meet my specific needs.

That’s when I started wondering if it was possible to build something much simpler.

I stumbled upon a blog post on [codingwithstef.com](https://codingwithstef.com/2021-01-17-creating-a-markdown-driven-blog-using-laravel-8), which provided a great starting point, as the author aimed to create a basic model using the filesystem, but I decided to ditch the filesystem approach and instead use the [Sushi Model Driver](https://github.com/calebporzio/sushi) for handling the Posts, since the Filesystem approach would not be easily paginating through all of my posts and felt slow.

For this project, I used [spatie/yaml-front-matter](https://github.com/spatie/laravel-markdown) to parse the Markdown files and [spatie/laravel-markdown](https://github.com/spatie/laravel-markdown) to render the content.

With that foundation, here’s how I developed a simple Blog model:

```php
namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;
use Spatie\LaravelMarkdown\MarkdownRenderer;
use Spatie\YamlFrontMatter\YamlFrontMatter;

class Blog extends Model
{
    use \Sushi\Sushi;

    public $incrementing = false;

    protected $primaryKey = 'slug';

    protected $keyType = 'string';

    protected function sushiShouldCache()
    {
        return true;
    }

    protected $casts = [
        'meta' => 'array',
    ];

    public function getRows()
    {
        $rows = [];
        foreach (File::files(storage_path(env('BLOG'))) as $file) {

            $markdown = new MarkdownRenderer;
            $yaml = YamlFrontMatter::parse(File::get($file->getRealPath()));

            $row['meta'] = json_encode($yaml->matter());
            $row['slug'] = str_replace('.md', '', $file->getBaseName());
            $row['body'] = $markdown->disableAnchors()
                ->highlightTheme('github-dark')
                ->toHtml($yaml->body());

            $rows[] = $row;
        }

        return $rows;

    }
}
```

How you design your views is entirely up to you. You can create a custom template or choose a default one from the web—whatever suits your needs.

I then further decided to add a [SEO Package](https://github.com/archtechx/laravel-seo) to add the necessary SEO tags.

```php
namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Helpers\Tools;
use App\Models\Blog;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class BlogController extends Controller
{
    public function index(Request $request)
    {

        seo()
            ->title('B65')
            ->description('a nerdy dev blog')
            ->twitter();

        return view('blog.index', ['posts' => Blog::orderBy('slug', 'DESC')->simplePaginate(5)]);
    }

    public function post(Request $request, $slug)
    {
 
        $post = Blog::where('slug', $slug)->firstOrFail();

        seo()
            ->title($post->meta['title'])
            ->description($post->meta['excerpt'])
            ->image($post->meta['image'] ?? '')
            ->twitter();

        return view('blog.post', ['post' => $post]);
    }
}
```

Finally you also will be needing the Routes for your Blog Controller:

```php
Route::get('/', [BlogController::class, 'index']);
Route::get('/{slug}.html', [BlogController::class, 'post']);
```

I hope this article was helpful. If you have any questions or suggestions please let me know in the comments section below.