Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray) on steroids. This is how you can work…
I'm very happy to announce that, as of today, our Laravel and PHP packages have been downloaded a million times. We now have more than 80 packages registered on Packagist. All combined they are downloaded around 150 000 times a month, and that number seems to be growing. Our GitHub organisation has…
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Over at Sitepoint, Younes Rafie wrote a tutorial on how to create a custom mail driver in Laravel 5.3. In the post he shows some code that can log all email to the database.
One of the many goodies Laravel offers is mailing. You can easily configure and send emails through multiple popular services. ... Laravel also provides a good starting point for sending mails during the development phase using the log driver, and in production using smtp, sparkpost, mailgun, etc. This seems fine in most cases, but it can’t cover all the available services! In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to extend the existing mail driver system to add our own.
https://www.sitepoint.com/mail-logging-in-laravel-5-3-extending-the-mail-driver/
Kyle E. Mitchell goes over the MIT License, line by line.
If you’re involved in open-source software and haven’t taken the time to read the license from top to bottom—it’s only 171 words—you need to do so now. Especially if licenses aren’t your day-to-day. Make a mental note of anything that seems off or unclear, and keep trucking. I’ll repeat every word again, in chunks and in order, with context and commentary. But it’s important to have the whole in mind.
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2016/09/21/MIT-License-Line-by-Line.html
Eric L. Barnes explains what Computer Vision Syndrome is, and what you can do to avoid it.
In no point in human history have people been staring at bright screens just a few feet from their face like they are today. Computer vision syndrome or CVS (not to be confused with Concurrent Versions System) is one side effect to this, and it’s affecting millions of people.The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health reports computer vision syndrome affects about 90% of the people who spend three hours or more a day at a computer, which means almost everyone in our industry is susceptible.
My colleague Seb needed to convert some color values in PHP. He looked around for some good packages, but there weren't any that fit the bill. So guess what he did? He just created a new package called spatie/color. Here's what it can do: $rgb = Rgb::fromString('rgb(55,155,255)'); echo…
I've been using PHP for quite some time now, and I had never heard of class_alias before reading this post by Fabian Schmengler.
Sometimes you want to rename a class or move it to a different namespace. But as soon as it is used anywhere outside the package, this is breaking backwards compatibility and should not be done lightheartedly.Luckily there is a way in PHP to have both, the old class and the new class, while deprecating the old one: class_alias().
In an older post on his blog Adam Wathan shared an interesting approach on how to prevent API drift between a test mock and an actual implementation.
One of the risks of writing your own test doubles is that the API of the double can fall out of sync with the API of the real implementation.In this screencast I walk through an example that explains:
- How interfaces can provide a false sense of security
- Why tests make better contracts than interfaces
- How to run multiple implementations against a shared set of contract tests
If you’ve ever had issues with API drift, try this approach and let me know how it works for you.
https://adamwathan.me/2016/02/01/preventing-api-drift-with-contract-tests/
Jarek Tkaczyk wrote a blogpost on the usage of accessors in Eloquent. He demonstrates what could go wrong when using accessors on certain fields.
The moral of the story is, that data handling and its presentation should not go into the same bucket. And the model is that bucket – instead of creating accessors, traits or god knows what for this task, better use decorator (like) pattern where you can do all the necessary work for preparing your data to be displayed in your view, without touching actual values anywhere else.
https://softonsofa.com/they-can-bite-how-not-to-use-accessors-in-eloquent/
Keep this in mind when you should use my pragmatic approach for presenters. Watch out for conflicting names.
In the Laravel template that we use to kickstart all our client projects at Spatie, I recently changed the way we handle presenters. Instead of using Jeffrey Way's popular presenter package we now use simple traits. In this post I want to give some background on that change. In case you've never…
A new major version of laravel-backup was recently tagged. This package can backup files and databases of your Laravel app (or any PHP application really). The backup consists of a zipfile containing a dump of the databases and all files that are selected for backup. The package will copy over the…
Laravel Shift is a paid service that can upgrade a Laravel project. I've used it a couple of times. Although some manually work is needed to complete the upgrade, it has saved me many hours. The service has recently shifted it's 1000th project, a major milestone. In a post on his blog Jason shares how he started the service and where it's going in the future.
In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.
http://jason.pureconcepts.net/2016/09/laravel-shift-1000-applications-upgraded/
A new version of PHP is always the right time to fix or enhance some syntax specific points, or to add some minor new features to the language. Here are some of the changes for PHP 7.1 that I noticed the most.
https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-syntax-and-consistency.html
John Saito, a designer at Dropbox, wrote down some very useful tips to improve the text in your UI.
Technically speaking, I’m a writer. I get paid to write words. But here’s something most people don’t know about me: I hate to read. ... You see, I mostly write interface text for apps and websites. It’s a style of writing where brevity beats brilliance, and every character counts. Writing interface text is actually a lot like design—designing words for people who hate to read.
What does “pure function” mean in the context of JavaScript? In programming in general, purity is also known as “referential transparency”, a fancy way of saying “replacing an expression or function call with its result will never change the behavior of the program” or a way of saying “every time you pass the same inputs, you always get the same outputs”.That sounds intuitive, and a function like x => x * 10 looks pure because every single time you pass it the number 3 as argument you will get 30 as output. So how can we tell that one function is pure and the other isn’t? Is it enough that we just read the code?
Spoiler: reading the code isn't enough.
http://staltz.com/is-your-javascript-function-actually-pure.html
If you want to learn some neat bash tricks, read this excellent read by Sam Rowe.
If you’ve ever used GNU/Linux, chances are good that you’ve used bash. Some people hold the belief that using a GUI is faster than using a CLI. These people have obviously never seen someone who uses a shell proficiently. In this tutorial, I hope to show you just a few of the amazing features bash provides that will increase your productivity in the shell.
Eric Barnes of Laravel News wrote a good tutorial on how to create a sitemap with Laravel.
A few years ago search engines recommended submitted sitemaps to help with indexing your website and now the importance of this is debatable.I’m of the mindset creating and submitting can’t hurt, so I spent a little time putting one together and wanted to share how easy this is in Laravel.
Did you know you can, in JavaScript loop over certain emoji's? You can also combine some emoji's. Cool stuff!
https://www.bram.us/2016/08/27/fun-with-javascript-and-emoji/
Joe Ferguson shares a tip on how to make a version of PHPUnit's assertArraySubset where the order of the array does not matter.
The problem with this test is that `assertArraySubset()` will fail if the items in the array are out of order. And since we don’t have an `ORDER BY` on our query in our data source we cannot guarantee the order of the returned data.
