How to add Previous and Next links on wardrobe

If you’re a regular here you may have noticed that I’m always making some small improvements on my blog. The last one was quite simple, I just wanted to add some previous and next links when the user is reading an article. However, I wasn’t aiming to just simple arrows. I wanted to user to see the title of those articles.

Since my blog uses wardrobe and that is built on top of Laravel, doing that is pretty straight forward.

First let’s go to the PostController and get those articles.

This is the function you’re looking for:

/** * Display the specified resource. * * @param string $slug * * @return Response */ public function getShow($slug) { $post = $this->posts->findBySlug($slug); if ( ! $post) { return App::abort(404, 'Page not found'); } return View::make('themes.'.$this->theme.'.post', compact('post')); }

So let’s get the prev and next articles based on the Post object.

/** * Display the specified resource. * * @param string $slug * * @return Response */ public function getShow($slug) { $post = $this->posts->findBySlug($slug); if ( ! $post) { return App::abort(404, 'Page not found'); } $prev = DB::table('posts')->orderBy('id', 'asc')->where('id', '>', $post->id)->where('active', '1')->first(); $next = DB::table('posts')->orderBy('id', 'desc')->where('id', '<', $post->id)->where('active', '1')->first(); return View::make('themes.'.$this->theme.'.post', compact('post', 'next', 'prev')); }

Quite easy right? Now you may want to do the same in your getPreview function.

/** * Show a post preview. * * @param int $id * * @return Response */ public function getPreview($id) { $post = $this->posts->find($id); if ( ! Auth::check() or ! $post) { return App::abort(404, 'Page not found'); } $prev = DB::table('posts')->orderBy('id', 'asc')->where('id', '>', $post->id)->where('active', '1')->first(); $next = DB::table('posts')->orderBy('id', 'desc')->where('id', '<', $post->id)->where('active', '1')->first(); return View::make('themes.'.$this->theme.'.post', compact('post', 'next', 'prev')); }

Now you just need to add that navigation links to your layout. I added mine to my post.blade.php file, since our next and prev links will only be used there.

<nav class="other_posts"> <ul> @if($next) <li id="next"><a href="" rel="prev"> </a></li> @endif @if($prev) <li id="previous"><a href="" rel="next"></a></li> @endif </ul> </nav>

That’s is, nice and easy.

ps: Soon after I published this post I had this talk with Dan Horrigan. Turns out there’s a better way to do it.

Basically he got the same result with just one query. Look at this beauty.

$post = $this->posts->findBySlug($slug); if ( ! $post) { return App::abort(404, 'Page not found'); } $posts = DB::select('SELECT * FROM `posts` WHERE `active` = 1 AND (`id` = (SELECT MIN(`id`) FROM `posts` where `id` > ?) OR `id` = (SELECT MAX(`id`) FROM `posts` where `id` < ?))', array($post->id, $post->id)); $prev = null; $next = null; $count = count($posts); if ($count == 2) { list($prev, $next) = $posts; } elseif ($count == 1) { if ($posts[0]->id > $post->id) { $next = $posts[0]; } else { $prev = $posts[0]; } } return View::make('themes.'.$this->theme.'.post', compact('post', 'next', 'prev')); }

public function getShow($slug) {

Keep in mind that this is really only useful if it is a high traffic site. Thank you Dan.