Building a Personal Blog with Laravel: A Real World Project

A personal blog sounds like a simple Laravel project. Create posts, show them on the homepage, and you are done. But once you start adding search, categories, tags, comments, SEO, authentication, analytics, and an admin panel, things become much more interesting. I built this Laravel Personal Blog as a real world project to explore those problems instead of building another basic CRUD application. The complete source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/arafat-web/laravel-personal-blog Table of Contents What Is This Project? Technology Stack Main Features Project Structure How Visitor Analytics Works SEO and Content Management How to Run the Project What I Learned Final Thoughts What Is This Project? This is a complete single-author blogging platform built with Laravel. It includes both a public blog and a custom admin panel. The project was built without additional application packages, so most of the important functionality is visible in the codebase itself. The public side contains: Homepage Blog posts Categories Tags Search Comments RSS feed Sitemap SEO metadata Post view tracking The admin panel contains: Dashboard Post management Category and tag management Comment moderation User management General settings SEO settings Visitor analytics Technology Stack The project uses: PHP 8.3+ Laravel 13.17 MySQL or SQLite Blade Eloquent ORM JavaScript CSS PHPUnit The current project configuration requires PHP 8.3 and Laravel 13.17. Main Features The project goes beyond basic CRUD. For example, posts can have categories, tags, comments, authors, featured images, publishing status, and view counts. The Post model defines these relationships using Eloquent: public function user (): BelongsTo { return $this -> belongsTo ( User :: class ); } public function categories (): BelongsToMany { return $this -> belongsToMany ( Category :: class ); } public function tags (): BelongsToMany { return $this -> belongsToMany ( Tag :: class ); } public function comments (): HasMa