An interview about the business side of our packages original
I recently was interviewed by Povilas Korop about the business side of our packages.
Originals — posts I've written myself.
Our dashboard has been updated to make use of Laravel Echo original
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…
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Automatically generate a sitemap in Laravel original
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…
Debugging collection chains original
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…
A package to easily work with regex in PHP original
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…
Some handy collection macros original
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…
Things I learned from reading Laravel: Up and running original
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…
Our packages are now postcardware original
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…
Use Sequel Pro's colored favourites original
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…
A package for testing mail in Laravel original
Tighten has developed a very useful package for testing mail in Laravel.
Processing a csv file in Laravel original
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…
A package to log activity in a Laravel app original
In your apps there's probably a lot going on. Users log in and out, they create, update and delete content, mails get sent and so on. For an administrator of an app these events provide useful insights. In almost every project we make at Spatie we log these events and show them in the admin-section…
Laravel Analytics v2 has been released original
One of our more popular packages is laravel-analytics. The package makes it easy to fetch information such as pageviews, top referrers, etc... from the Google Analytics API. In our Blender-based projects we use the fetched data to display a nice chart in the admin section: Laravel-analytics is one…
Debugging collections original
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.…
Building a dashboard using Laravel, Vue.js and Pusher original
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…
The grid layout for our dashboard original
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…
A Blade directive to export PHP variables to JavaScript original
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…
The pipe collection macro original
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…
A package to determine which track a last.fm user is playing original
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…
A package to manage events on a Google Calendar original
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…
