In this section you can read posts I've written myself.

Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.

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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.

Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.

Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.

Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.

Creating beautiful invoices using Tailwind and Laravel PDF

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Last week, we released a new package called Laravel PDF that allows you to transform Blade views into PDFs. Under the hood, Chromium is used to perform the transformation. Because Chromium is an up-to-date browser, you can use any modern CSS you like.

Some people have asked if they can use Tailwind to style their documents. And I’m happy to report you can. Let’s take a look at a minimal example to showcase this.

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Easily create PDFs in Laravel apps

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We’ve released a new package called spatie/laravel-pdf, a batteries-included package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps. Under the hood, it uses Chromium to generate PDFs from Blade views. You can use modern CSS features like grid, flexbox, and even frameworks like Tailwind to create beautiful PDFs.

In this post, I’d like to introduce and demonstrate the package.

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New major versions for spatie/image and Laravel Media Library have been released

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

We’ve released a new major version of spatie/image, v3. This package makes it very easy to manipulate images using PHP.

At the same time, we’ve also released a new major version of spatie/laravel-medialibrary. This is a powerhouse package that can associate all kinds of files with Eloquent models. The latest version of this package now uses spatie/image v3 under the hood for manipulating images.

In this blog post, I’ll explain why we made new major versions and how they can be used.

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Creating my new album "Kind"

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 17 minute read

This blog post will be a little different. I'm not going to write about programming as usual. Over the past few months, I have worked on my new album titled "Kind". You can listen to it on these platforms:

In this blog post, I'll share how this album was made from conception to release.

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Video: the keynotes of Full Stack Europe 2022

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Last year at Full Stack Europe we had two great keynotes by two amazing speakers: Jeremy Keith and Kevlin Henney. We're very happy that we can share the recordings with you.

Next month, we'll have a new edition of Full Stack Europe, you can purchase your tickets here. We have an excellent line-up featuring Justin Jackson, Una Kravets, and people that work at companies like Meta, Google, Netlify. If you're familiar with the Laravel community, you'll also probably recognize Kai Sassnowski, Tobias Petry, and a few others! Hope to see you at the conference!

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Craft emails that look good in each email client using MJML

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

In a perfect world, email clients can render HTML as good as major browsers. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Email clients don't support modern HTML and CSS niceties and have a lot of quirks to be mindful of. Making sure an HTML email looks good in the most used email clients takes a lot of work.

To make crafting HTML emails a lot more enjoyable, the folks at Mailjet created a solution called MJML, which stands for "Mailjet Markup Language." It's an easy-to-use abstraction layer over HTML.

We have created a new package called spatie/mjml-php to easily convert MJML to HTML using PHP. If you're using Sidecar, you'll be happy to know that we've also created a package called spatie/mjml-sidecar, to convert MJML to HTML using Sidecar.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

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Using Postmark Rebound to improve handling of bounced emails

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Whenever Oh Dear detects something wrong with your site, it can send you a notification. We have multiple channels available: Slack, Telegram, webhooks, and many more. The most popular channel our users use is just simple mail.

Behind the scenes, Oh Dear uses Postmark to send emails. Postmark will inform us whenever a notification mail results in a hard bounce. A hard bounce means that the mail won't be delivered. The most common reason for this is that the mailbox doesn't exist (anymore). This can occur when somebody changes jobs, and the work email address no longer exists.

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