Freek.dev

Because Laravel comes with excellent scheduling functions out of the box, artisans don't need to edit the crontab often. If you need to do some scheduling manually, here's a little site that can help you write a cron scheduling expression.

http://crontab.guru/

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Nicolas Widart, author of Asgard CMS, created a new package called laravel-modules that can help splitting up a large Laravel app in modules.

On his blog he published an introductory post.

Just imagine having a medium sized application where everything is in the `app/ù folder, worse, every model is in the root of the app folder! At some point you will spend a lot of time looking for things because everything is bunched together.

This is what being modular is trying to resolve. You split of the business logic into different parts, which belongs together. If you're into Domain Driven Design, you can consider a module an aggregate.

Every module has its own routes/controllers/models/views/business logic/etc. Meaning every module contains a group of classes that all are related to each other in some way.

https://nicolaswidart.com/blog/writing-modular-applications-with-laravel-modules

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In my book Joseph Silber is one of the unsung heroes of the Laravel ecosystem. Whenever I open up internals on Larachat or Github he's giving friendly and thoughtful advice. I was happy to learn that Joseph started a blog.

In the first post he goes over all the improvements made to authentication in Laravel 5.3.

Authentication has gotten some nice improvements in 5.3, so let's examine it piece by piece.

• Introducing the authenticate method
• The exception handler's unauthenticated method
• The Authenticate middleware
• Authenticating against multiple guards
• Route model binding and global scopes
• Bonus: the request's expectsJson method

https://josephsilber.com/posts/2016/07/10/authentication-improvements-in-laravel-5-3

If you're looking for a package that can handle roles and abilities in Laravel, be sure to check out his Bouncer package.

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Laravel 5.3, which will be released at this years Laracon US, has some new very handy functionality to work with MySQL 5.7 JSON columns. In a post on his site Matt Stauffer demonstrates the new API.

While Laravel has had the ability to cast your data to and from JSON since version 5.0, it was previously just a convenience—your data was still just stored in a TEXT field. But MySQL 5.7 introduced an actual JSON column type.

Laravel 5.3 introduces a simple syntax for lookups and updates based on the value of specific keys in your JSON columns.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/new-json-column-where-and-update-syntax-in-laravel-5-3

If you're going to use this functionality, you should also read Mohamed Said's post on how to improve performance by using MySQL generated columns.

JSON columns cannot be indexed. You can work around this restriction by creating an index on a generated column that extracts a scalar value from the JSON column.

http://themsaid.com/laravel-mysql-json-colum-fast-lookup-20160709/

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All sites owned by EU citizens or targeted towards EU citizens must comply to a crazy EU law. This law requires a dialog to be displayed to inform the users of your websites how cookies are being used. You can read more info on the legislation on the site of the European Commission. The newest Laravel package made by my colleagues at Spatie and myself makes your app compliant with that law.

Once installed the package will render the following dialog that, when styled, will look very much like this one:

When the user clicks "Allow cookies" a laravel_cookie_consent cookie will be set and the dialog will be removed from the DOM. On the next request Laravel will notice that the laravel_cookie_consent has been set and will not display the dialog again.

We've made it easy to customize the texts shown by the dialog. You can also make changes to the dialog or JavaScript itself.

The legislation is pretty very vague on how to display the warning, which texts are necessary, and what options you need to provide. This package will go a long way towards compliance, but if you want to be 100% sure that your website is ok, you should consult a legal expert.

Take a look at the package on GitHub to learn how to install the package and which options it provides. If you like it, be sure to check out our full list of Laravel packages.

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In a new tutorial posted at dotdev.co Diaa Fares shows a good way to develop API's using Laravel. Along the way he touches on the Dingo packages, JSON Web tokens and documentation generation.

Let’s look at everything we will cover: Landmark 1: Prepare our TDD environment and creating our first test. Landmark 2: Installing and configuring Dingo API package. Landmark 3: What are Transformers, why the need for them and how to use thephpleague/fractal as our transformation layer. Landmark 4: Introduction about JWT and how to use tymondesigns/jwt-auth for our token based authentication. Landmark 5: How to use laravel-apidoc-generator to generate nice documentation for our API. So, pack your bags and let’s dive into our journey!

https://dotdev.co/test-driven-api-development-using-laravel-dingo-and-jwt-with-documentation-ae4014260148#.iynir3ftm

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Over at the excellent dotdev.co Amo Chohan wrote an article on how to structure code when you need many filters on an Eloquent model.

I recently needed to implement a search feature in an events management project I was building. What begun as a few simple options (searching by name, e-mail etc), turned into a pretty large set of parameters. Today, I’ll go over the process I went through and how I built a flexible and scalable search system. For those of you who are eager to see the final code, head over to the Git repository to see the code.

https://dotdev.co/writing-advanced-eloquent-search-query-filters-de8b6c2598db

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The release of Laravel 5.3 is just around the corner. Over at Laravel News Eric L. Barnes made a nice overview of the new stuff coming in the framework.

Laravel 5.3 is currently in development and with all new Laravel releases, new features are being teased out as they are added. Here is a quick look at some of these new features.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/06/look-whats-coming-laravel-5-3/

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Matt Stauffer has been working on a book titled "Laravel: Up and Running" which will be released soon. In a post on his blog Matt shares a few hidden Laravel gems that he discovered while writing his book.

No blog post could contain all of the new things I learned from writing this book. I've been using—and teaching about—Laravel for years, and I was still shocked by how many tools and helpers and features I discovered.

Here are a few that stand out to me that I had never seen prior to writing the book.

https://mattstauffer.co/blog/things-i-didnt-know-laravel-could-do

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Sebastian De Deyne, developer at Spatie and creator of several Spatie packages, has written a post on how to override Laravel's default translation provider.

When building a website for a client that wants to be able to manage content, Laravel's language files aren't ideal since you can't edit them without diving into a bundle of text files. We recently decided to drop all the lang files in our custom CMS in favor of persisting translations in the database, which allows us to build a custom interface for managing them.

This post is a quick overview on overwriting Laravel's default translation loader, which means you can keep using the lang method while fetching the translations from a database. Writing a custom loader is easier than it sounds. First we'll set up our translation models, then we'll write our loader, and finally register it in our application.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2016/using-a-database-for-localization-in-laravel

Seb implemented the described functionality in Blender, our Laravel template we use to kickstart nearly all our projects.

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