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

Configuring PhpStorms code generation

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

I've been using PhpStorm for quite some time now, but never took the effort to fix a few minor annoyances I had with it. Getting rid of the default comment for new PHP files First up, when creating a new PHP file or class you PhpStorm will add this comment block like this by default: /** * Created…

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Failing gracefully on stage

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Here's a video of Surma having technical problems while presenting his State of Houdini talk. Luckily Jake Archibald and others "help" him out ? No matter how well you prepare a talk, you can always have technical difficulties. If you handle the failure gracefully, the public won't mind.…

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A better way to register routes in Laravel

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Let's take a look at how you can define routes to controllers in Laravel. By default you can do it like this: Route::get('my-route', 'MyController@index'); This will look for the MyController class in the App\Http\Controllers namespace. This default namespace is set up in Laravel's…

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How PHP conferences can be improved

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read

The past few years I visited and spoke at a lot of PHP conferences. PHP Benelux, Laracon EU and US, PHP UK Conference, PHP World are only a few of the conferences I thoroughly enjoyed. Visiting those conferences can be recommended to anyone interested in PHP. Regardless of which level you're at…

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Calling an invokable in an instance variable

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Invokables in PHP are classes that you can use as a function. They have been around since PHP 5.3 and have many interesting use cases. Here's a quick example. class Invokable { public function __invoke() { echo 'I have been invoked'; } } You can use it like this: // outputs 'I have been…

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Making Nova fields translatable

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

Laravel Nova is cool package to quickly create admin interfaces in a Laravel app. Unfortunately there's no support for multiple locales out of the box. A while ago we published a package called nova-translatable that makes any of the built in field types translatable. Using the package In order to…

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Our packages have been downloaded 20 million times

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

At Spatie we do a lot of open source work. You can find a list of our packages on the open source section of our website. I'm proud to share that, according to Packagist, the Spatie packages have now been downloaded over 20 million times. The rate at which they are being downloaded is growing too.…

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Easily switch PHP versions in Laravel Valet

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Besides enjoying some greenfield work, we often have to work on legacy projects at Spatie too. Sometimes those projects don't run on the latest PHP version. I this blogpost I'd like to show you a way to switch PHP version easily when using Laravel Valet. (I know you could also use Docker or…

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Searching models using a where like query in Laravel

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

For a project I'm working on I needed to build a lightweight, pragmatic search. In this blogpost I'd like to go over my solution. Searching Eloquent models Imagine you need to provide a search for users. Using Eloquent you can perform a search like this: User::query() ->where('name',…

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My current setup (2018 edition)

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read

After tweeting out a screenshot, it often get questions around which editor, font or color scheme I'm using. Instead of replying to those questions individually I've decided to just write down the settings and apps that I'm using. IDE I mainly program PHP. Mostly I develop in PhpStorm. Here's a…

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Use custom html components in your Blade views

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

Today we launched our newest package called BladeX. In short this package provides you with an easy html like way to render custom html components in your Blade views. In this blogpost I'd like to introduce the package to you. A first example When building a server rendered app you're probably going…

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Introducing BladeX View Models

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Earlier today we released BladeX, a package that allows you to use Blade components using a Vue inspired syntax. Read all about it in my previous blogpost. In the latest North Meets South podcast Jacob and Michael discussed BladeX and wondered if the package could be married with view models or…

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A tags field for Nova apps

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read

A while ago I ditched the custom admin of this blog in favour of Laravel Nova. As you might have noticed every blog post on murze.be has some tags. Nova ships with many form fields but a field to use tags is not included out of the box. That's why I created my own tags field and released it as…

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The Laracon US videos have been released

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

Laracon US was held in July 2018 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. I had the pleasure of speaking at the conference. You can watch my talk on v7 of our medialibrary below. Though there isn't a playlist to hold them yet, you can view recordings of all other talks on the StreamACon…

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Introducing our Laravel Nova packages

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read

Introducing our Laravel Nova packages Laravel Nova is a beautiful admin panel that was first showcased at Laracon 2018 by Laravel creator Taylor Otwell. Using Nova building rich admin panels is a breeze. Nova was released today. Taylor was kind enough to give us early access to Nova shortly after…

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Announcing the Full Stack Europe conference

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read

The past few months my buddy Dries and I have been preparing a brand new conference called Full Stack Europe. The conference will take place in the city of Antwerp somewhere in spring or early summer of 2019. With the conference, we want to welcome every type of developer, wether you identify…

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A few notes about the frontend of the renewed spatie.be

Original – by Willem Van Bockstal – 5 minute read

Before we moved in to our new offices in 2014, we quickly set up a temporary one-page website, initially only in Dutch. It lasted for 4 years and bursted out of its frames ever since, because… hmm … no priority, no time. A new site was like a running joke for a long time, until Laracon US 2018…

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A new website for Spatie: backend highlights

Original – by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read

For the first time in 4 years we completely redesigned our company website. We launched it today. The site is a simple Laravel app with some technical niceties. True to form we also open sourced the app, you can find the code in this repo on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like you to give you a tour…

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