In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
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…
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On all these platforms, regularly share programming tips, and what I myself have learned in ongoing projects.
Every month I send out a newsletter containing lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer.
Expect quick tips & tricks, interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day there is an emphasis on that framework.
Rest assured that I will only use your email address to send you the newsletter and will not use it for any other purposes.
A few weeks ago I released a package called db-dumper. The package can dump the structure and contents of a database to a file. Here's how it can be used: Spatie\DbDumper\Databases\MySql::create() ->setDbName($databaseName) ->setUserName($userName) ->setPassword($password)…
Using plain PHP it's kinda hard to display emoji characters. In PHP 5 those characters could be generated by using json_encode. echo json_decode('"\uD83D\uDE00"'); //displays ? I bet no one can type this code by heart. In PHP 7 it's a little bit easier. The hot new version of PHP…
This morning I got a mail from the support department of DigitalOcean, which hosts most sites for my company Spatie. (If you're not familiar with DO-speak, "droplet" is just a synonym for "server")
At the end of this month our local user group, PHP Antwerp, will hold it's third meetup. It'll be sponsered by Spatie, of which I'm a co-owner. In this post I'd like to explain why we are sponsering this event. Of course as a company it's good to get our name out there but there are other more…
If you don't want a site to be indexed by search engines you must place a robots.txt file. Typically you don't want anything indexed except production sites. Today Spatie released a new package called laravel-robots-middleware. It was coded up by my colleague Sebastian. Instead of you having to…
For a project I needed to extract some text from a pdf. Although there were already a few packages that could to this, I still created spatie/pdf-to-text because I wanted something that was really easy to use. And also because it's fun creating packages. Under the hood a utility called pdftotext is…
I decided to add a newsletter to my blog. The plan is to send out a newsletter every two weeks. Newsletters will contain lots of interesting stuff for the modern PHP developer. You can expect quick tips, links to interesting tutorials, opinions and packages. Because I work with Laravel every day…
Spatie, the company where I work, recently released a Laravel package called laravel-sluggable. It automatically creates unique slugs when saving a model. To install the package you just need to put the provided Spatie\Sluggable\HasSlug-trait on all models that have slugs. The trait contains an…
A few weeks ago I made a cli tool to check the status code of all links on a site. It made use of a home grown crawler. Today the Laravel integration gets released. The new package called laravel-link-checker can log all broken links. By default, a link is considered broken if the status code of…
Exactly one year ago the very first post on murze.be was published. This blog was mainly started as a way to bookmark interesting links. Along the way I shared programming tips, talked a bit about learning and gave some background on the Spatie packages. It's been a fun ride and looking at the…
Envoy is Laravel's official task runner. Using a Blade style syntax tasks can be defined that can be run both locally and remotely. At Spatie, we've been using Envoy for quite some time to deploy code on production servers. Summarized our trusty Envoy script did the following things: bringing the…
Laravel ships with some good validation capabilities. Form request validation is a nice way to make sure http requests pass valid data. To validate stuff that enters the application in some other way validators can be created manually. Unfortunately this is kinda verbose: $validator =…
When Spatie unleashes a new site on the web we want to make sure that all, both internal and external, links on it work. To facilitate that process we released a tool to check the statuscode of every link on a given website. It can easily be installed via composer: composer global require…
At Spatie we're constantly improving our application template called Blender. We love using packages to pull in functionality. Creating and using packages has many benefits. Though we try to create public packages that benefit the community, there are some packages that are very specific to Blender.…
At Spatie we use a homegrown Laravel template called Blender. It's being used on nearly all our projects. When starting with a greenfield project we take a copy of Blender and make project specific changes in that copy. We built it because we want maximum flexibility and don't want to be hampered by…
A few days ago Jeffrey Way published an interesting lesson on how to integrate pjax with Laravel. Pjax is jquery plugin that leverages ajax to speed up the loading time of webpages. It works by only fetching specific html fragments from the server, and client-side updating only certain parts of the…
Today I released a new package called laravel-fractal. It provides a Fractal service provider for Laravel. If you don't know what Fractal does, take a peek at their intro. Shortly said, Fractal is very useful to transform data before using it in an API. Using Fractal data can be transformed like…
