Real-Time Customization. Development Tutorials, Guides & Insights

• Toggle the visibility of a sidebar or specific widgets.
• Control the number of items displayed in a section (e.g., recent posts or featured products).
• Enable or disable specific content sections dynamically.

We’ll build a system to manage these behaviors using site settings stored in a database.

Create or edit app/Helpers/helpers.php and add the following:

   use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Cache;

   if (!function_exists('getSetting')) {
       function getSetting($key, $default = null)
       {
           return Cache::rememberForever("setting_{$key}", function () use ($key, $default) {
               $setting = \App\Models\Setting::where('key', $key)->first();
               return $setting ? $setting->value : $default;
           });
       }
   }

   namespace App\Models;

   use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

   class SiteSetting extends Model
   {
       protected $fillable = ['key', 'value'];
   }

Add initial settings for testing purposes.