In this section you can read posts I've written myself.
When starting out with Laravel I made a medialibrary to associate uploaded files with models. In our custom made cms we use the medialibrary to for example associate articles with images. In short the medialibrary could: associate files with models generate thumbnails and other derived images from…
Earlier tonight the first PHP Antwerp meetup was held. The event was organised by Dries Vints of BeatSwich. I was the first speaker and talked a little bit about Satis and how we use it at Spatie. You can view the slides on Speakerdeck. The big talk of the evening was delivered by Mitchell van…
Stay up to date with all things Laravel, PHP, and JavaScript.
You can follow me on these platforms:
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.
Google Tag Manager allows you to add tags to your site without editing the site code. A tag, in Google parlance, is a snippet of JavaScript that sends information to a third party, such as... Google. There are tags to install things like Analytics, Adwords or others on your site . To use GTM you…
Inspired by Edd Man's post on optional value control-flows I made a small Laravel package to optionally abort your application. The package provides a Spatie\OrAbort\OrAbort-trait that can be used on any class you want. All the methods of the class will gain orAbort-variant. When the original…
Laravel offers a nice way to add pagination. As far as your routes are concerned you don't have to do a thing. It just works out of the box. Unfortunately the generated url's are pretty ugly: http://example.com/news?page=2 What we want are url's that look like this: http://example.com/news/page/2…
Prosper Otemuyiwa recently wrote an article on how to create Laravel 5 packages on his blog. Although his approach is entirely valid and may suit you well, I work a little differently when creating a new package. First, I create a new GitHub repository where the package will live. In that repo I…
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…
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…
