Originals — posts I've written myself.
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
Tighten has developed a very useful package for testing mail in Laravel.
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by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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.…
by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 7 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 3 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 1 minute read – Edit
A few days ago I was interviewed by Atif Shahab, PHP community manager at Cloudways, on Laravel and PHP.
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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 =…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read – Edit
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…
by Freek Van der Herten – 4 minute read – Edit
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…
