In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
For several projects and other packages we need to manipulate URL's. Instead of coding the same URL class over and over again, we extracted URL manipulation to it's own package. Here are some code examples on how you can use it. $url = Url::fromString('https://spatie.be/opensource'); echo…
For several different clients we needed to display a schedule of opening hours on their websites. They also wanted to display if a department / store / ... is open on the moment you visit the site. My colleague Seb extracted all the functionality around opening hours to the newly released…
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In a vanilla Laravel installation you can use language files to localize your app. The Laravel documentation refers to any string in a language file as a language line. You can fetch the value of any language line easily with Laravel's handy trans-function. trans('messages.welcome'); //…
Recently I was working an a project where, in order to use the webapp, users should first apply for an account. Potential users can fill in request form. After the request is approved by an admin they may use the app. Our client expected that the barrier to request an account should be very low.…
Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray) on steroids. This is how you can work…
I'm very happy to announce that, as of today, our Laravel and PHP packages have been downloaded a million times. We now have more than 80 packages registered on Packagist. All combined they are downloaded around 150 000 times a month, and that number seems to be growing. Our GitHub organisation has…
My colleague Seb needed to convert some color values in PHP. He looked around for some good packages, but there weren't any that fit the bill. So guess what he did? He just created a new package called spatie/color. Here's what it can do: $rgb = Rgb::fromString('rgb(55,155,255)'); echo…
In the Laravel template that we use to kickstart all our client projects at Spatie, I recently changed the way we handle presenters. Instead of using Jeffrey Way's popular presenter package we now use simple traits. In this post I want to give some background on that change. In case you've never…
A new major version of laravel-backup was recently tagged. This package can backup files and databases of your Laravel app (or any PHP application really). The backup consists of a zipfile containing a dump of the databases and all files that are selected for backup. The package will copy over the…
I recently was interviewed by Povilas Korop about the business side of our packages.
A couple of months ago we released a dashboard powered by Laravel, Pusher and Vue.js. In tandem with Laravel 5.3 a new JavaScript library was released called Laravel Echo. This library makes it very easy to work with a service like Pusher. This weekend I took the time to update the dashboard to make…
Today my company released a package called laravel-sitemap. There are already a lot of excellent sitemap packages out there. They all have in common that you have to manually add links that must appear in the sitemap. With our new package that isn't required. It can automatically build up a sitemap…
A couple of weeks ago I published a blog post on how you can easily debug collections using a dd macro. Meanwhile my company released a package that contains that macro. In this post I'd like to introduce a new dump macro, recently introduced in the package, that makes debugging collection chain…
PHP offers some functions to work with regular expressions, most notably preg_match, preg_match_all and preg_replace. Unfortunately those functions are a bit hard to use. Take preg_match_all for example, it requires you to pass in an array by reference to get all the matches. When something goes…
Laravel's collection class is truly wonderful. It contains a lot of handy methods and you can create some very elegant code with it. In client projects I found myself adding the same macro's over and over again. That's why my colleague Seb and I took some time to create a package aptly called…
Matt Stauffer is currently putting the final touches on his new book called Laravel: Up And Running. It aims to be a good guide for newcomers to the framework. But even if you've got some experience with Laravel, it should be worth your time to read it. Even Matt himself picked up a lot of cool…
My company has released a lot of PHP and Laravel packages. According to the packagist stats they have been downloaded for a little over 700 000 times. Up until now they've all been free. That is going to change. Our packages are now postcardware. This means that from now on you are required to send…
Every single day I use Sequel Pro to manage MySQL databases for all projects I'm working on. Sequel Pro gets used in both development and production environments. Because the databases mostly have the same name and tables in all environments it's very easy to mix them up. You have to be really…
Tighten has developed a very useful package for testing mail in Laravel.
From time to time I need to process a csv file. PHP provides a fgetcsvfunction to help with that task. Unfortunately this is a very basic function. It will not, for instance, recognize a header column as such. In this quick post I'll show how using the excellent laravel-excel package (which can…
