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On open sourcing Blender

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

At Spatie we use a homegrown Laravel template called Blender. It's being used on nearly all our projects. When starting with a greenfield project we take a copy of Blender and make project specific changes in that copy. We built it because we want maximum flexibility and don't want to be hampered by the limitations of a one size fits all out of the box solution. The whole team is constantly tinkering and improving Blender, it's an experimenting ground for learning new techniques.

A few weeks ago I put the source code of Blender in a public repo on GitHub. There are several benefits in doing so:

  • Because the quality of the code is directly reflecting on our company, there is a extra incentive to deliver quality.
  • Potential clients can inspect our code before trusting their projects to us. They will hopefully agree that anybody proficient in Laravel can modify Blender.
  • All tools like Travis, Scrutinizer and Sensiolabs Insights and GitHub can be used for free.
  • In time, we might get quality pull requests like the ones we're get on our public packages.
This is how the login screen and back-section look like:

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 22.00.11

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 22.43.49 Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 22.53.37

Screen Shot 2015-10-27 at 22.59.06

If you need a good Laravel based CMS that is well documented and intended for public use take a look at Asgard CMS, October CMS or one of the many alternatives. But if you want learn a bit by diving into code head over to the Blender-repo on GitHub. You might discover some things that could come in handy in your projects.

Some interesting tidbits on how Blender works:

Putting the code on GitHub is just a first step. We currently offer no support and no public documentation. Though it might take a while that might change in the future. If we ever get to that point, we can leverage the power of the community to improve our code.

You may use Blender for your own projects but please note that we offer no support whatsoever and do not guarantee that the code is stable. In short: when using Blender you're on your own. But don't let that stop you reading the code on GitHub.

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