In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
In the last few months various little parts of our custom built CMS were made available as composer installable packages. Though creating a package takes some time, there are many benefits: my colleagues and my future self can benefit from the same documentation that is written for the consumers of…
A few hours ago I tagged version 1.0.0 of a my new package: laravel-newsletter. It provides a very easy way to interact with email marketing services. Or maybe I should simply say MailChimp, as it is currently the only supported supported service. After you install the package (un)subscribing an…
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At Spatie all our greenfield projects are powered by custom built CMS based on Laravel 5. An important part of the CMS is the medialibrary-component. It handles how uploaded files are associated with models. My intern and I recently took the time to release our medialibrary as a package on GitHub.…
If you need to retrieve some data from your Google Analytics account in Laravel 5, then laravel-analytics is the package for you. Assuming the analytics tracking code is installed on your site, the package allows you to determine which pages are visited the most, which browsers are used most to…
Last week I made a Laravel 5 package that could dump your db. Last saturday night I took the time to expand the functionality. laravel-backup can now backup your entire application. The backup is a zipfile that contains all files in the directories you specify along with a dump of your database. The…
This Laravel 5 package provides an artisan command to dump your database to a file. When installed you can dump your database with this command [code]php artisan db:backup``` A file containing the dump of your database will be created in the directory you specified in the config-file. I plan on…
Last week Laravel 5 was released. Unfortunately that handy command for tailing the logs that you know and love from Laravel 4 was not included. The laravel-tail package brings it back. You can install it via composer: composer require spatie/laravel-tail After that you'll have to register the…
The activitylog-package provides a very easy way to log activities of the users of your app. Today I took the time to make it compatible with Laravel 5. Logging some activity couldn't be easier: [code] /* The log-function takes two parameters: - $text: the activity you wish to log. - $user: optional…
My current hosting provider, DigitalOcean, has a great backup service. It takes frequent snapshots of entire droplets and it's very easy to restore the snapshot quickly. Unfortunately backups are only taken once every week. For our clients this is not acceptable. If you only rely solely on the DO…
When installing an SSL certificate on your server you should install all intermediate certificates as well. If you fail to do so, some browsers will reported "untrusted" warnings for your site like this one: Searching and downloading those intermediate certificates can be a hassle. It…
Elasticsearch is a lightning quick open source search server. It's java-based (but don't let that scare you) and can index and search documents. If you want to know more about it, watch this excellent talk by Ben Corlett. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waTWeJeFp4A For a recent Laravel project I had…
Probably you're using a .gitignore file for every project. If you find yourself creating a .gitignore file for the same files on every project you should use a global .gitignore file. You can specify the location of the global .gitignore file with this command: git config --global core.excludesfile…
Earlier today Spatie, the company where I work, launched a webshop polkadots.be. When the project started one of the first choices that we had to make was if we were going to use an existing solution or build our own custom solution. For this project we took an extensive look at some existing…
