Day 5: Dynamic Rendering

Day 5: Dynamic Rendering

Summary

Before I went to bed yesterday I decided to lean into the Rhizome theme a bit harder and renamed Sites to Shoots. Along that same these instead of creating sites we’ll be sprouting shoots. I did not rename anything in the database, middleware, or controller. I just changed the views to reflect the botanical theme.

For Day 5 my goal was to transform shoots from identical placeholders into dynamic pages by allowing users to define a description and a theme color during the “sprouting” process.

Today’s Definition of Done:

• The sites table includes description (text) and theme_color (string) columns.
• The “Sprout a New Shoot” form on the dashboard includes inputs for these two new fields.
• Submitting the form correctly saves the description and color to the database
• Visiting a shoot’s subdomain displays that shoot’s description instead of a hardcoded message.

Work Session

Starting off today I knew I needed to add two new colums to the site table so back to php artisan for another migration.

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$ php artisan make:migration add_content_to_sites_table --table=sites

   INFO  Migration [database/migrations/2026_01_16_034514_add_content_to_sites_table.php] created successfully.

Inside the migration I added a nullable description of type text and a string for theme color that defaults to green.

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public function up(): void
{
    Schema::table('sites', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->text('description')->nullable(); 
        $table->string('theme_color')->default('green');
    });
}

public function down(): void
{
    Schema::table('sites', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->dropColumn(['description', 'theme_color']);
    });
}

Then I updated the Site model to add the new description and theme_color columns to the $fillable array to ensure I could save them using the form.

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protected $fillable = [
    'name',
    'slug',
    'custom_domain',
    'description',
    'theme_color',
];

After that I was ready to update the form, so back to resources/views/dashboard.blade.php.

And the last part of this step was to run the migration so I could move on to the controller.

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$ php artisan migrate

   INFO  Running migrations.

  2026_01_16_034514_add_content_to_sites_table .......................................................... 10.53ms DONE

After the migration succeeded I was ready to update the store login in SiteController so my new values could be stored in their respective columns.

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public function store(Request $request)
{
    $request->merge([
        'slug' => Str::slug($request->slug),
    ]);

    $validated = $request->validate([
        'name' => 'required|string|max:255',
        'slug' => 'required|string|unique:sites,slug|max:255',
        'description' => 'nullable|string|max:1000',
        'theme_color' => 'required|string|in:blue,green,purple',
    ]);

    $request->user()->sites()->create($validated);

    return redirect()->route('dashboard')->with('success', 'Shoot sprouted successfully!');
}

And finally I needed to include the description and the theme_color in the json output in Tenant\SiteController.

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public function index()
{
    $site = app('current_site');
    return response()->json([
        'shoot_name' => $site->name,
        'description' => $site->description ?? 'No description yet.',
        'theme_color' => $site->theme_color,
        'owner' => $site->user->name,
    ]);
}

And to prove to myself that it was working I created another new site called Joes Site.

Recap

I added the description and theme_color columns to the sites table and updated the Site model and the view for the form on the dashboard. then I ran the migration to apply the database changes and updated the SiteController to allow the new form inputs to be saved to the correct columns in the sites table and the Tenant\SiteController to ensure the page is dynamically rendering based on content in the database.

The commit for todays session is commit a7a1488.