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

Selling digital products using Laravel part 8: Mailing updates and news using Mailcoach

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We'd like to stay in touch with the people interested in our products by sending them emails when we got some news on an upcoming product, or when we are running a promo for existing products. To handle subscriptions and send out emails, we use our home-grown Laravel package Mailcoach. Let's take a look at how we use Mailcoach ourselves.

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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.

Selling digital products using Laravel part 1: Intro + a tour of spatie.be

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

On our Laravel powered company website we sell digital products: video courses, e-books, and software packages. Behind the scenes we use Laravel, Paddle, Vimeo, the GitHub API and a couple of other things.

We've open-sourced our site. You'll find the actual code we have deployed in the spatie-be repo on GitHub. In this blog post, I'll guide you through the code.

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Selling digital products using Laravel part 5: Using Satis to install private packages

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Some of our products, like Mailcoach and Media Library Pro, are PHP packages for which people can buy a time-limited license. Of course, we want customers to be able to install our paid packages using Composer. Our paid packages are not registered on Packagist, because Packagist is meant to be used for free packages, and there's no way to handle licenses. Let's take a look at how we can solve this using Satis.

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Why and how you should monitor scheduled tasks

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read

Oh Dear is the monitoring SaaS that my buddy Mattias and I are running. As you might suspect, our service can monitor the uptime of sites and SSL certificates' health. What sets Oh Dear apart from the competition is that it can also monitor performance and detect broken links and mixed content on any of the pages of your site.

Today, we added a new type of monitoring: scheduled tasks monitoring. Oh Dear can now notify you whenever one of your scheduled tasks has not run or is running too late.

You can get started monitoring your schedule today. We have a free ten-day trial. And when using this coupon code, you'll get 30% off on the first three months when subscribing: MONITOR-ALL-THE-THINGS.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce how you can use scheduled task monitoring in Oh Dear, and how it works under the hood. There were a lot of interesting challenges we had to solve. I hope you're ready to dig it.

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How to call an overridden trait function

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Traits are a wonderful thing in PHP. You can use them to reduce code duplication by putting common functions in a trait and apply them to all classes where those functions are needed. I also sometimes use traits to break up a large function in multiple single-use traits.

In this post, I'd like to show you how you can override a trait function and call it from the overriding function.

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Introducing Laravel Beyond CRUD: a way of building large Laravel applications

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

It's funny how from the outside, IT is often seen as an exact science. When starting as a developer, I often heard people say: "Oh, you're in IT, so you must be good at mathematics". I never understood why someone who is supposedly good at mathematics is the right person to fix a printer.

When you have some experience building applications, you know that IT is not an exact science. There are multiple valid solutions to a problem. Take five developers and ask them what the best way to set up a blog is. You'll likely get five different answers. Each suggestion will have its own set of tradeoffs.

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How to group queued jobs using Laravel 8's new Batch class

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 14 minute read

Laravel 8 offers a shiny new way to group multiple jobs into one batch. This will allow you to easily check how many job there are in a batch, what to total progress is and even cancel all jobs in a batch.

In this blog post, I'd like to share how we will use this feature in the upcoming v3 of Mailcoach. We'll also take a look at how batches are implemented under the hood in Laravel.

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Using Blade components for handling layouts

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Blade components are a wonderful feature of Laravel. In most examples you can see them being used for small UI elements. Did you know you can use them for layouts as well? Want to see more videos like this one? Head over to the Readable Laravel video series on our website.

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