Originals — posts I've written myself.
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…
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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…
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…
