If you look to laravel official documentation http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/templates It says that giving this layout:
<!-- Stored in app/views/layouts/master.blade.php -->
<html>
<body>
@section('sidebar')
This is the master sidebar.
@show
<div class="container">
@yield('content')
</div>
</body>
</html>
Extended by this view
@extends('layouts.master')
@section('sidebar')
<p>This is appended to the master sidebar.</p>
@stop
@section('content')
<p>This is my body content.</p>
@stop
Will append to the section sidebar. But actually if you try is it doesn't append, it just override the content from the extended template.
I heard about others blade function like @append, @prepend, @parent... no one seems to work.
Beside, this example in the official doc which doesn't work, I find that the blade documentation is very poor. There's nothing about blade function like @parent for instance.
The example in the documentation from Laravel website does indeed seem to be flawed, but I think it's a markdown parsing problem on the website, the same docs on github show the correct code:
In any case @parent does indeed work. The example in the docs should look like this:
@extends('layouts.master')
@section('sidebar')
@parent
<p>This is appended to the master sidebar.</p>
@stop
@section('content')
<p>This is my body content.</p>
@stop
A quick look in the Illuminate/View/Factory.php confirms what @parent does:
/**
* Append content to a given section.
*
* @param string $section
* @param string $content
* @return void
*/
protected function extendSection($section, $content)
{
if (isset($this->sections[$section]))
{
$content = str_replace('@parent', $content, $this->sections[$section]);
}
$this->sections[$section] = $content;
}