A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post on how you can easily debug collections using a dd macro. Meanwhile my company released a package that contains that macro. In this post I'd like to introduce a new dump macro, recently introduced in the package, that makes debugging collection chain…
A couple of months ago Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down his opinion on the Laravel's LTS release. I couldn't agree more with this piece.
The more developers that get trapped by LTS, the more of a drag it creates on the Laravel community. Potentially having adverse affects on its growth. Using LTS as a minimum compatibility line for a Laravel package or other third-party code is understandable. But freezing your apps to an LTS version is not. Your apps should run the latest stable version of Laravel.
https://medium.com/@jasonmccreary/laravel-lts-is-a-trap-97b1d1103961
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Laravel Passport is an easy to use OAuth2 server that was released alongside Laravel 5.3. Mohamed Said wrote an excellent guest post at Laravel News about the grant types used in Passport.
OAuth2 is a security framework that controls access to protected areas of an application, and it’s mainly used to control how different clients consume an API ensuring they have the proper permissions to access the requested resources.Laravel Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation; it was built to make it easy to apply authentication over an API for laravel-based web applications.
I've seen two different tips for speeding up your tests in Laravel in the past week and thought I'd share them with you. For me, they made a significant impact on the speed of my tests.
https://driesvints.com/blog/two-tips-to-speedup-your-laravel-tests/
The Laracon EU conference is happening right now. Talking to other developers is a joy like always, the speakers are great and the venue is amazing. Here's a good recap written by Simon Nicklin of the first day of the Laracon EU conference.
We entered the building and joined the back of the queue. I say we, even though I travelled on my own I already felt part of something. The queue snaked around a mood light corner to the awaiting registration desk where we are split into last name lanes. A pleasant volunteer welcomed me as I showed her my ticket. After a quick flick through the name cards I'm registered. For me this was the start of Laracon EU 2016.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/laracon-eu-conference-2016-day-1-simon-nicklin
PHP offers some functions to work with regular expressions, most notably preg_match, preg_match_all and preg_replace. Unfortunately those functions are a bit hard to use. Take preg_match_all for example, it requires you to pass in an array by reference to get all the matches. When something goes…
Recently Eric L. Barnes put a new coat of paint on Laravel News. Behind the scenes there were some changes as well. In a new post he explains how he integrated the Wordpress backend with a Laravel app.
Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.
https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/wordpress-api-with-laravel/
In this post I'd like to share a quick tip on how you can improve the readability of your code with array_filter.
Today I was working on some code that looked something like this:
class Address
{
...
public function toArray()
{
$address = [
'name' => $this->name,
'street' => $this->street,
'location' => $this->location,
];
if ($this->line2 != '') {
$address['line2'] = $this->line2;
}
if ($this->busNumber != '') {
$address['busNumber'] = $this->busNumber;
}
if ($this->country != '') {
$address['country'] = $this->country;
}
return $address;
}
}
Did you know that you can use array_filter to clean this up? I didn't, until today.
When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value (so null, or an empty string) Here's the refactored, equivalent code:
class Address
{
...
public function toArray()
{
return array_filter([
'name' => $this->name,
'street' => $this->street,
'line2' => $this->line2,
'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
'location' => $this->location,
'country' => $this->country,
]);
}
}
That's much better!
Just be careful when using this with numeric data that you want to keep in the array. 0 is considered as a falsy value too, so it'll be removed as well.
Joind.in is a website where attendees can leave feedback for speakers delivering talks and conferences and user groups. This feedback is very useful for the speakers who which improve their skills. In my mind it is an essential part of the PHP ecosystem.
For the last 6 years Lorna Jane Mitchell and Rob Allen have maintained the project. They are now looking for others to take over their duties.
This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.
Jordan Scales examined the contents of the node_modules directory a discovered a lot of junk.
While code bloat continues to slow down our websites, drain our batteries, and make “npm install” slow for a few seconds, many developers like myself have decided to carefully audit the dependencies we bring into our projects. It’s time we as a community stand up and say enough is enough, this community belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of JavaScript developers with great hair.I decided to document my experiences in auditing my projects’ dependencies, and I hope you find the following information useful.
In a new post on his site, Christoph Rumpel explains how you can quickly build a Facebook chatbot with PHP.
The chatbot topic is huge right now. Finally there is something quite new again and nobody knows what's happening next. This is the perfect time to start experimenting with chatbots and to build your own one right now. Give me 10 minutes of your time and I will give you your first chatbot!
http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/08/build-a-php-chatbot-in-10-minutes/
In the beginning of the year Wouter de Bres wrote this fantastic article on digital product design principles.
I wrote down twelve design principles for our team at Degreed to help us make design decisions. I tried to make them practical and clear and hopefully they are useful for anyone who is working on digital products.
https://medium.com/@WdeB/digital-product-design-principles-8bc9eb6c080c
Without any doubt Tim Wood, the creator of the awesome moment.js library, has done a lot for the community. It's really a shame that the constant pressure of maintaining the library has taken it's toll.
The correlation between Open Source and burnout is no secret, and I am not immune to it. ... Seeing bugs and issues continue to roll in and being mentally unable to address them has led to feelings of failure and depression. When looking at the moment project, I could only see the negatives. The bugs and misnomers and mistakes I had made. It let to a cycle of being too depressed to contribute, which led to being depressed because I wasn’t contributing.
In a new post on his blog Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down the summary of his Laracon US talk.
I consider myself a searcher. On a quest to find the Holy Grail of programming practices - that single practice which instantly levels up my skills. While I know this doesn’t exist, I do believe in a set of practices. Recently, I found one to be YAGNI.YAGNI is a principle of eXtreme Programming - something I practice daily at work. YAGNI is an acronym for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. It states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. In theory, this seems straightforward, but few programmers practice it.
Laravel's collection class is truly wonderful. It contains a lot of handy methods and you can create some very elegant code with it. In client projects I found myself adding the same macro's over and over again. That's why my colleague Seb and I took some time to create a package aptly called…
Matt Stauffer is currently putting the final touches on his new book called Laravel: Up And Running. It aims to be a good guide for newcomers to the framework. But even if you've got some experience with Laravel, it should be worth your time to read it. Even Matt himself picked up a lot of cool…
I love those conversational posts written by Uncle Bob. This time he responds to an article by Luciano Mammino who is saying goodbye to OO programming. Uncle Bob's conclusion:
We need to choose a language, or two, or three. A small set of simple frameworks. Build up our tools. Solidify our processes. And become a goddam profession.
Amen to that! Read the entire article on the Cleancoder blog.
Earlier today laravel-news.com, the official Laravel news source, received a new coat of paint. In a post announcing the launch Eric shares how the site works behind the curtains.
During this move, I have redone the way the site is powered. Previously it ran on WordPress with a custom theme I put together, it worked fine but added new features, and sections became harder and harder, and I wanted the ability to use what I am comfortable with, Laravel. However, I didn’t want to give up the media library and editing experience of WordPress.So to have the best of both worlds I kept the old site on WordPress and used the WP Rest API paired with the Laravel Scheduler. This allows me to automatically sync data from WordPress into my database without having to rebuild an entire CMS admin area. I have the same setup for the podcast section, and it hooks into the Simplecast API to pull those over.
https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/welcome-to-the-next-version-of-laravel-news/
I sure would like to read a tutorial on how that sync works in detail.
Laravel-Mediable is a package to upload and handle all sorts of files (aka media) in a Laravel app. It was built by a Canadian based web agency called Plank.
With it you can do things like this:
$media = MediaUploader::fromSource($request->file('thumb'))
->toDestination('uploads', 'post/thumbnails')
->upload();
$post = Post::create($this->request->input());
$post->attachMedia($media, ['thumbnail']);
Pretty cool. You can read more on the way and how the package was built in an introductory post on the Plank blog.
At Spatie we've also built our own solution for handling media. In Plank's blogpost Sean lists these differences between their package and our Medialibrary.
| spatie/laravel-medialibrary | plank/laravel-mediable | |
|---|---|---|
| Relationship | many-to-one polymorphic, each media record is owned by one related model | many-to-many polymorphic, each media record can connect to any number of related models, and vice versa. |
| Filesystem | Files are stored in directories named after the media id relative to the disk root | Files can be stored anywhere on the disk |
| Association Identifier | Each media record belongs to one "collection" | Media can be attached to a model with any number of "tags" |
| Aggregate Types | Support for images and pdfs | Configurable support for any number of custom types |
| Miscellaneous Features | Glide manipulations | Synchronization commands |
Since our medialibary was introduced I've been asked from time to time why our medialibrary uses a many-to-one polymorphic relationship. The answer is: simplicity.
A previous iteration of our Blender CMS (a version that used Zend Framework 1 instead of Laravel ?) had a screen where the user could pick a file from all uploaded files (it looked much like this wordpress screen). We saw that, after having set up a lot of sites with Blender, that almost none of our clients used that screen...
In our projects we also see that our clients mostly need to attach an image, or a pdf or whatever, ... to only one model (for instance a news item). It rarely happens that a client wants to attach the same file to different models.
In our code we want to handle that use case as simple as possible and that's why we preferred using a many-to-one relation over a many-to-many relation. All the other differences listed in Plank's post are caused by the same reasoning, we preferred simplicity and ease of use over flexibility.
If you're looking for a good solution to handle media in a Laravel app I suggest you take a look at both our Medialibrary and Plank's Mediable package. Both packages are good at what they do. Pick the one that best fits your project (and just feels good to you).
Gregory Brown wrote an excellent article on how you can grow as a programmer.
Do you know what the difference between competence and proficiency is? ... Competence means having enough experience and knowledge to get stuff done; proficiency involves knowing why you are doing something in a certain way, and how it fits into the big picture. In other words, a proficient practitioner is always a competent practitioner, but the opposite may not be true.
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/the-traits-of-a-proficient-programmer
