Originals — posts I've written myself.
by Freek Van der Herten – 9 minute read – Edit
Now that 2018 is coming to a close, a lot of awesome people have written a recap post. Here's mine! The most significant change on a personal level is that my girlfriend an I bought a house in Ghent. Together with our two kids, we moved this summer, and we now live in an awesome house that's very…
by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read – Edit
In an application I was working on I wanted to implement automated tweets. Of course, this logic should also be tested. In this blogpost I'd like to show you how you can easily handcraft your own mocks. Setting things up Let's first take a look at how you can tweet something in PHP. We're going to…
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by Freek Van der Herten – 31 minute read – Edit
laravel-websockets is a Laravel package that can handle the server side of WebSockets entirely. It completely replaces the need for a service like Pusher or a JavaScript-based laravel-echo-server. It has extensive documentation and a demo application you can play with. Marcel, developer and co-owner…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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.…
by Freek Van der Herten – 24 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we have a tv screen against the wall that displays a dashboard. This dashboard displays the tasks our team should be working on, important events in the near future, which tasks each of our team members should be working on, what music they are listening to, and so on. Here's what it looks…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 10 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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.…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
While working on a package I found myself trying to combine some data. This is what my code looked like. Assume that $locales and $fields are arrays that are already populated. collect($locales)->each(function (string $locale) { collect($fields)->each(function (Field $field) use ($locale)…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
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',…
by Freek Van der Herten – 8 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
