In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
Lately I've been working a lot with collections in Laravel. If you're not in the know: a collection is a sort of super charged array with a lot of powerful functions to transform the data inside it. The only thing I found a bit of a hassle is how to debug the various steps in a collection chain.…
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 music is playing at our office, and so on. Here's what it looks like: We've opensourced our dashboard, so you can view…
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The grid layout for dashboard.spatie.be was conceived with 3 simple ideas in mind: The layout has to be lightweight on the client side: no JavaScript calculations or full-blown grid library should be used. The HTML structure in the templates has to be clean, without extra markup for rows and…
Today we released our new package called laravel-blade-javascript. It provides you with a javascript Blade directive to export PHP variables to JavaScript. So it basically does the same as Jeffrey Way's popular PHP-Vars-To-Js-Transformer package but instead of exporting variables in the controller…
A few days ago I blogged some code to fetch data from Packagist using our homebrew wrapper around the packagist API. To summarize the amount of downloads this code was used: $totals = collect($packagist->getPackagesByVendor('spatie')['packageNames']) ->map(function…
If you've been reading the last couple of posts on this blog then you'll know we're busy building a dashboard. I think it's fair to say that everyone at Spatie is music addict. We have the unwritten rule that whoever who comes in first at the office is DJ for the day. One of the things we'd like to…
Like previously mentioned we're currently building a new dashboard to display on our wall mounted TV at the office. One of the things we want to show on that dashboard are important events for our company. Things like when a site goes live, when there's a conference we're going to visit, when we're…
At my work I'm currently creating a new dashboard. That's a fancy term for an html page sprinkled with some Vue magic that will be displayed on tv screen at the wall of our office. I won't say much about the dashboard itself on this post, but I'll make sure to write something on that in the near…
For a project I'm working on I needed to interact with a Google Calendar. If you've ever worked with some API's by Google then you know their documentation can be very confusing. It's not that they don't have documentation, but code examples of common use cases are simply not present. You must wade…
A few days ago I was interviewed by Atif Shahab, PHP community manager at Cloudways, on Laravel and PHP.
Today we released a new major version of our laravel-newsletter package. This package makes it easy to integrate MailChimp in your Laravel app. Under the hood V3 of the MailChimp API is used. If you're used the older version of our package be sure to upgrade by the end of this year: MailChimp will…
Today we tagged a new major version of laravel-medialibrary. In case you're not familiar with this package here's a quick rundown of what it can do. The package can associate all sorts of files with Eloquent models. It provides a simple, fluent API to work with. Here's a quick example: $newsItem =…
Spatie, the company where I work, is located in Belgium. Although our country is quite small, there are three official languages: Dutch, French and German. That's why nearly all of our projects are multilingual. In most projects we used to rely on Dimitris Savvopoulos popular translatable package to…
At Spatie we do not only create a lot of Laravel packages, but we use also use a bunch of existing ones. In this post I'd like to give a quick hint to our fellow package developers. In the readme's of packages you'll often find an instruction like this to publish it's assets: php artisan…
Virtually every website displays some sort of menu. Generating html menus might seem simple, but it can become complex very quickly. Not only do you have to render some basic html, but you also have to manage which item is active. If a menu has a submenu you'll also want the parents of an active…
A few years ago all the projects I worked on were served on a shared hosting environment. It was quite common that a client had ftp access to server to upload some files. A control like Cpanel or Plesk made it really easy to create some ftp accounts. Fast forward to today. Most projects are hosted…
Most databases will contain some records that must be cleaned up. The reasons why a record can become unneeded are diverse: maybe it's a temporary record that was only needed for a little while if you're logging stuff to a table, a record may become too old to be of interest anymore ... To help a…
Today our team released a new major version of laravel-backup. It can backup the files and databases of your application to one or more external filesystems. It uses Laravel's native cloud filesystem to do this. The package can also notify you via Slack and/or email when something goes wrong with…
Yesterday our newest package laravel-feed was released. It makes generating RSS feeds in Laravel very easy. It's very opinionated to fit the needs of our projects, but I believe lots of other developers will find it useful too. There's almost no coding involved to create some feeds. Installation…
A few days ago Spatie, the company where I work, launched a new website: vrijwilligerswerk.be. Translated to english it roughly comes down to workforvolunteers.be. On the website various organizations can post their jobs that can be filled by a volunteer. Volunteers have a very user-friendly way to…
