The basic idea is simple: make form creation simpler.

View a quick visual demonstration.

I'm tired of creating form fields, like this:

<div class="form-group">
    {{  Form::label('username', 'Username:' ) }}
    {{ Form::text('username', null, ['class' => 'control-group']) }}
</div>

Instead, with this FormField class, you can simply do:

{{ FormField::username() }}

That will then produce the necessary (Bootstrap-friendly, by default) HTML. It uses dynamic methods to simplify the process a bit.

While it will do its best to figure out what kind of input you want, you can override it.

{{ FormField::yourBio(['type' => 'textarea']) }}

This will produce:

<div class='form-group'>
    <label for="yourBio">Your Bio: </label>
    <textarea class="form-control" type="textarea" name="yourBio" cols="50" rows="10" id="yourBio"></textarea>
</div>

So, yeah, it's just a helper class. If your forms require a huge amount of customization, this probably won't work for you. But for simple forms, it'll do the trick nicely!

(It also makes Laracasts demos way easier to setup. :)

Usage

To try this out:

Begin by installing the package through Composer.

require: {
    "way/form": "dev-master"
}

Next, add the service provider to app/config/app.php.

'providers' => [
    // ..
    'Way\Form\FormServiceProvider'
]

That's it! You're all set to go. Try it out in a view:

{{ FormField::username() }}
{{ FormField::email() }}
{{ FormField::custom(['type' => 'textarea']) }}
{{ FormField::address(['label' => 'Your Address']) }}

That will produce the following. Though it's Twitter Bootstrap friendly by default, you can of course customize the class names as you wish.

If you want to override the defaults, you can publish the config, like so:

php artisan config:publish way/form

Now, access app/config/packages/way/form/config.php to customize. Here's what it lists by default:

return [

    /*
     * What should each form element be
     * wrapped within?
    */
    'wrapper' => 'div',

    /*
     * What class should the wrapper
     * element receive?
    */
    'wrapperClass' => 'form-group',

    /**
     * Should form inputs receive a class name?
     */
    'inputClass' => 'form-control',

    /**
     * Frequent input names can map
     * to their respective input types.
     *
     * This way, you may do FormField::description()
     * and it'll know to automatically set it as a textarea.
     * Otherwise, do FormField::thing(['type' => 'textarea'])
     *
     */
    'commonInputsLookup'  => [
        'email' => 'email',
        'emailAddress' => 'email',

        'description' => 'textarea',
        'bio' => 'textarea',
        'body' => 'textarea',

        'password' => 'password',
        'password_confirmation' => 'password'
    ]
];