Originals — posts I've written myself.
by Freek Van der Herten – 15 minute read – Edit
This post was first published on 24daysindecember.net Chances are that you've never heard of my company Spatie. We specialise in creating Laravel applications for our clients. Our team is rather small: we consist of only 6 developers and one manager. On first glance we are just a web agency like…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
Laravel has an excellent Collection class that has many useful operations. The class is also macroable. This means that you can add function to it at runtime by calling macro on it and passing a name and a closure. In our projects we tend to code up the same macro's over and over again. That's why…
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by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
laravel-medialibrary is a package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. Like mentioned before on this blog my team and I are currently creating a new major version, v7,…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
laravel-medialibrary is a powerhouse package that can help handle media in a Laravel application. It can organise your files across multiple filesystems, generate thumbnails, optimize images and much much more. My team and I are hard at work creating a new major version, v7, that adds a lot of…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Let's talk a little bit about Symfony's dump function. It's part of their VarDumper component. The function can dump a variable to the screen or browser in a nicer format than PHP's native var_dump. In the recently released Symfony 3.4 and Symfony 4 the function got a nice little improvement that…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Three years ago I started this blog to share my bookmarks and interesting links with fellow developers. Like on the previous anniversaries I'd like to share some cool statistics from the past 12 months. For the period spanning from end november 2016 until end november 2017 my little blog served 591…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
PurgeCSS is a tool that can reduce the filesize of a CSS file. It does this by removing any css classes that are not used. It can detect which CSS classes are used by scanning the source files of your application. In this tweet Jonathan Reinink shared how it can be configured in Laravel Mix: ???? I…
by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read – Edit
Regular visitors will have noticed that last week this blog got a new coat of paint. This new layout isn't just a new WordPress theme. Things have changed on the backend as well. Previously my blog was powered by WordPress. I've migrated it to a custom built Laravel app. That app is open sourced.…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
Recently my company Spatie launched https://dnsrecords.io, a beautiful site to quickly lookup dns records. True to form, we also opensourced it, here is the sourcecode on GitHub. If you want to do some dns lookups in your own app, you'll be happy to know that we extracted the dns lookup…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Most of the sites we build for our clients contain some sort of contact form. For those client such forms are potentially critical to their business. Imagine for instance a real estate firm that generates leads with such forms. In most cases we will store the submitted values in the db and mail them…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
To convert html to a pdf or an image using wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage tends to be the popular option. Unfortunately those tools contain an outdated browser engine to do their thing, so you can't use any newish css syntax. A while ago Google added a headless mode to Chrome. They've also released a…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
In the project I'm currently working on I had to integrate Stripe webhooks. Stripe has great documentation on how to handle webhooks, but it still took a fair amount of time to get the integration just right. My solution for handling webhooks is pretty generic and reusable by others. I decided to…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
Every time our team releases a package I have the habit of writing an introductory blogpost. But after the initial release most pages gain more features through PRs by the community and ourselves. Mostly these new feature go unnoticed. That's why I plan on regularly writings posts on noteworthy…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
We recently released our newest package called macroable. It contains a trait that, when applied to class, can dynamically add methods to that class. This trait is basically a stand alone version of the macroable trait in Laravel. In this post I'd like to show you how you can use it, how it works…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
At beginning of the summer we released a new Vue component called vue-table-component. Our aim was to create a very easy to use Vue component to render a table with data. You can toy a little bit with the component on the demo page. Recently Seb and I worked on two cool new features which I want to…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
laravel-medialibrary is probably one of our most powerful packages. It can associate files with Eloquent models. It can also generate derived images such as thumbnails. It has a very developer-friendly API to work with. Here's a quick example:…
by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we've released a plethora of Laravel packages. Now that Laravel 5.5 has been released most of our packages will get a new (major) version. In this blogpost I'd like to explain how we handle new releases of the framework and what it means for our packages. Preparing for release Laravel has…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
My colleague Jef, who handles accounts at Spatie, recently was interviewed by Viraj Khatavkar. Read it to learn some interesting tidbits on how our company is being run.
by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read – Edit
At Spatie we recently launched a new site: guidelines.spatie.be. It contains articles on how we go about setting things up at Spatie and a collection of styleguides. The source code of the site is available on GitHub. In this blogpost I'd like to share why and how we created our guidelines site. Why…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
Recently I needed to add some global functionality to nearly all Vue components in an app. My colleague Seb told me a good way to achieve this: global mixins. In this post I'd like share that knowledge. In Vue a mixin is some functionality bundled in a file that can be added to one or more Vue…
