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One of my favourite features that was introduced in Laravel 5.4 are the higher order collection functions. It allows you to rewrite

collect($models)->filter(function(Model $model) {
   $model->passesFilter();
});

to:

collect($models)->filter->passesFilter();

This works with the filter method an a bunch of other collection methods.

In a new post on his blog Nicola Malizia explains how these methods work under the hood.

A new version of Laravel is available from 24 January 2017 and, as usual, it comes with a lot of new features. Among them, there is one that takes advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP. Some out of there will contempt this, but I find it awesome!

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-laravels-highorder-collections-ee4f65a3029e

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Andrew Welch of the New York based agency nystudio107 wrote a good overview of the options agencies & freelancers have regarding hosting.

Web hosting is something that many agencies and freelancers don’t give a whole lot of thought to. They just use whomever they’ve had a long-standing relationship with, and call it a day.

However, choosing the right host—and the right type of host—can be crucial to the success of a project. And the hosting world has changed a whole lot in the past few years, so let’s dive in.

https://nystudio107.com/blog/web-hosting-for-agencies-freelancers

At my company Spatie we're pretty happy with our choice to hosts our client projects on VPSes. We provision them using Laravel Forge and some custom ansible scripts.

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Sebastian De Deyne, author of many Spatie packages, posted a new blog article on how to generate SEO Friendly Urls in Laravel.

When admins create or update an news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. On the other hand, if we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, titles that were edited later on would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2017/non-breaking-seo-friendly-urls-in-laravel

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A great feature of Laravel Spark is it's ability to impersonate other users. As an admin you can view all screens as if you are logged in as another user. This allows you to easily spot a problem that your user might be reporting. Laravel-impersonate is a package, made by MarceauKa and Thibault Chazottes that can add this behaviour to any Laravel app.

Here are some code examples taken from the readme.

Auth::user()->impersonate($otherUser); // You're now logged as the $otherUser.

Auth::user()->leaveImpersonation(); // You're now logged as your original user.

$manager = app('impersonate');

// Find an user by its ID
$manager->findUserById($id);

// TRUE if your are impersonating an user.
$manager->isImpersonating();

// Impersonate an user. Pass the original user and the user you want to impersonate
$manager->take($from, $to);

// Leave current impersonation
$manager->leave();

// Get the impersonator ID
$manager->getImpersonatorId();

It even includes some handy blade directives:

@canImpersonate
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate', $user->id) }}">Impersonate this user</a>
@endCanImpersonate

@impersonating
    <a href="{{ route('impersonate.leave') }}">Leave impersonation</a>
@endImpersonating

Want to know more, take a look at the package on GitHub.

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In a short blogpost Michael Dyrynda gives some good advice on why you should cache your routes and config values.

As part of the recommended production deploy process it is important to run the caching commands that Laravel affords us via Artisan. This means running config:cache and route:cache, which will compile the config and route files down into a single file each.

In doing so, Laravel aims to speed up parsing of these files by only needing to read a single, rather than multiple files.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/environment-variables-config-caching-and-laravel

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Nicola Malizia wrote a short blog post on how Laravel's handy Macroable trait can be used and how it works under the hood.

If you check the Laravel codebase I’m sure that you can observe that Laravel makes use of traits.There is one trait in the source code that pulls my attention. I’m talking about the Macroable trait. ... The purpose of this trait is to extend (not in an OOP sense) a class at run-time. This way, you can add behavior without editing the original class source code.

https://unnikked.ga/understanding-the-laravel-macroable-trait-dab051f09172

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If you want to know how a visitor got on your site you can check the referer request header. Yeah, it's misspelled. That header contains the url of the previously visited page. Unfortunately browsers will fill that header regardless of the previous url was an internal or external one. So after the first click on an internal link you won't know anymore on which site a visitor was on previously.

Our new laravel-referer package aims to fix that problem. Once the package is installed it will remember the original referer in session. So even after a users clicks around on your site, you are still able to detect which site he or she visited previously.

Because users are also often tracked using UTM Codes the package will also remember the utm_source query parameter.

The easiest way to retrieve the referer is by just resolving it out of the container:

use App\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = app(Referer::class)->get(); // 'google.com'

Or you could opt to use Laravel's 5.4 fancy new automatic facades:

use Facades\Spatie\Referer\Referer;

$referer = Referer::get(); // 'google.com'

To know more take a look at the readme of the package on GitHub.

https://github.com/spatie/laravel-referer

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Probably because I'm a heavy user of Laravel I read a lot of Laravel focused blogs and follow a lot people on Twitter who also are heavy users of the framework. But more than a Laravel developer, I consider myself a PHP developer first. One of the ways I try to stay in touch with what is happening in the larger PHP community is following this excellent link blog maintained by Chris Cornutt.

http://www.phpdeveloper.org/

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Most of the Laravel apps we create at Spatie will send mails. This can be a password reset mail, a welcome mail after registration, an order confirmation mail, ... One of the things we do is styling such mails so it has the same look and feel as the site it was sent from. When testing such mails our designers had to request a password reset or go through the entire checkout flow just to receive such an order confirmation mail. To make that testing process a lot easier we've created a package called laravel-mailable-test. This package provides an artisan command that can send a mailable to an mail-address.

To send any mailable issue this artisan command:

php artisan mail:send-test "App\Mail\MyMailable" recipient@mail.com

This will send the given mailable to the given email address. The to-, cc- and bcc-addresses that may be set in the given mailable will be cleared. The mail will only be sent to the email address given in the artisan command.

The package will provide a value for any typehinted argument of the constructor of the mailable. If an argument is a int, string or bool the package will generated a value using Faker. Any argument that typehints an Eloquent model will receive the first record of that model.

Image the constructor of your mailable looks like this:

public function __construct(string $title, Order $order) 
{
   ...
}

That constructor will receive a string generated by the sentence method of Faker and the first Order in your database.

The values that are passed to the constructor of the mailable can be customized using the values option of the command.

php artisan mail:send-test "App\Mail\MyMailable" recipient@mail.com --values="title:My title,order:5"

Using this command My title will be passed to $title and an Order with id 5 will be passed to $order.

To learn more about the package head over to the readme on GitHub. Be sure take also take a look at this list of Laravel packages our team has previously made.

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Michael Dyrynda, one of the two new hosts of the Laravel Podcast, share a nice tip on how to quickly switch PHP versions when using Laravel Valet.

At the time of writing, Laravel Valet ships with PHP 7.1 but if you're like me, you have some legacy projects around the place that haven't quite lifted their dependencies to PHP 7 just yet.

A lot of folks might have previously used a VirtualBox Virtual Machine, or more recently considered Docker but a lot of the time and especially when dealing with simpler situations, Valet may be all that you need.

https://dyrynda.com.au/blog/switching-php-versions-with-laravel-valet

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In a mail sent to all subscribers on the testdrivenlaravel.com-mailinglist Adam Wathan mentioned a talk Sandi Metz gave a couple of years ago at Rails Conf. It's a really good talk that explains in a clear way when and what you should test.

Tests are supposed to save us money. How is it, then, that many times they become millstones around our necks, gradually morphing into fragile, breakable things that raise the cost of change? We write too many tests and we test the wrong kinds of things. This talk strips away the veil and offers simple, practical guidelines for choosing what to test and how to test it. Finding the right testing balance isn't magic, it's a magic trick; come and learn the secret of writing stable tests that protect your application at the lowest possible cost.

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Mohamed Said explains the not so well known sometimes validation rule in Laravel.

Laravel's validation library is very powerful and easy to use, using a few keystrokes you can build a strong defence around your application, preventing invalid user input from corrupting the application flow and potentially introducing bugs.

...

In this post I'd like to highlight a trick related to conditionally adding validation rules.

http://themsaid.com/laravel-advanced-validation-conditionally-adding-rules-20170110/

To learn more read the relevant section in the Laravel docs.

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