Laravel layout

Extending the admin shell from Blade: page sections, breadcrumbs, bare layouts for auth screens, theming, and the two attributes the design system needs.

Last updated September 9, 2026

The Laravel edition is a Composer package — ColorlibHQ/gentelella-laravel. Live demo →

The admin shell

@extends('gentelella::page')

@section('title', 'Products')
@section('page_key', 'products')
@section('breadcrumb', 'Home > Catalogue > Products')

@section('content')
    …
@endsection

Section
`title`	Prepended to the configured base title
`page_key`	Matched against the menu to mark an item active
`breadcrumb`	`>`-separated trail; see below
`content`	The page body, inside `.page-wrapper`

A controller may pass $pageKey and $breadcrumb as view data instead; the variables win over the sections.

Bare pages

@extends('gentelella::layouts.blank')

No sidebar, no topbar — for auth screens, error pages and landing pages. Same <head>, so the theme, fonts and assets are identical.

DOM order

The layout emits exactly what the HTML edition’s build step produces, so the compiled CSS applies unchanged:

<a class="skip-link">…</a>
<aside class="sidebar">…</aside>
<header class="topbar">…</header>
<main id="main-content" class="main">
  <div class="page-wrapper">…your content…</div>
  <footer class="footer">…</footer>
</main>

Note the footer is inside <main>.

Breadcrumbs

Home > Projects|/projects > Acme Redesign

Every crumb but the last resolves to a link, in this order:

an explicit target after |
an exact label match against the menu
neither — plain text, no link

The last crumb is the current page: never a link, always aria-current="page".

Prefer a level that points somewhere. If a segment is a pure grouping with no landing page, drop it — Home > Kanban, not Home > Apps > Kanban.

A Blade gotcha

Blade runs inline @section values through e(), so @section('breadcrumb', 'Home > Forms') arrives as Home > Forms. The layout decodes before splitting and re-escapes each crumb on output, so this works — but it is why passing the value as view data behaves slightly differently from a section, and why any @section carrying markup-significant characters needs care.

The shell config island

Shell pages emit a JSON island in <head>:

<script type="application/json" id="gentelella-shell-config">
  {"links": {...}, "pages": [{"label": "Products", "section": "Catalogue", "href": "/admin/products"}]}
</script>

The design system reads it once. It exists because the JavaScript ships with the static template’s menu compiled in — without the island the ⌘K palette lists Gentelella’s demo pages and every result 404s in your app. pages comes from your configured menu (only entries that resolve to a real URL), and links from gentelella.links.

links.logout also changes how signing out works: given a URL, the design system POSTs a form carrying the CSRF token from <meta name="csrf-token"> rather than navigating, because signing out on a GET is CSRF-able.

Bare pages emit no island — there is no shell on them to configure.

`data-shell`

The shell layout puts data-shell="admin" on <body>. That attribute is what mountShell() looks for; without it the design system wires nothing at all — no sidebar accordion, no mobile drawer, no theme toggle, no topbar panels. It is markup that looks right and does nothing.

You get it automatically from gentelella::page. A hand-rolled layout has to set it.

Theming

Colours are CSS custom properties, so overriding one is a plain declaration in resources/css/gentelella.scss:

:root { --accent: #1abb9c; }
[data-theme='dark'] { --accent: #21d4ae; }

Dark mode is applied to <html> by an inline script before the body renders, so it never flashes the wrong way round. The same script restores text direction for RTL.