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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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In an awesome article at Sitepoint Christopher Pitt explains how he used the yay macro library to build up plugin framework to add new language features to PHP.

Chris made plugins that allows this syntax in PHP.

// short closure syntax
$items = ["one", "two", "three"];
$ignore = "two";

array_filter($items, ($item) => {
    return $item !== $ignore;
});

//class accessors

class Sprocket
{
    private $type {
        get {
            return $this->type;
        }

        set {
            $this->type = $value;
        }

        unset {
            $this->type = "type has been unset";
        }
    }
}

As with all things, this can be abused. Macros are no exception. This code is definitely not production-ready, though it is conceptually cool.

Please don’t be that person who comments about how bad you think the use of this code would be. I’m not actually recommending you use this code, in this form.

Having said that, perhaps you think it’s a cool idea. Can you think of other language features you’d like PHP to get? Maybe you can use the class accessors repository as an example to get you started. Maybe you want to use the plugin repository to automate things, to the point where you can see if your idea has any teeth.

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-make-modern-php-more-modern-with-preprocessing/

Check out some more examples on preprocess.io

Very cool stuff.

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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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Scott Arciszewski debunks the commonly given advice on securing your PHP installation by setting some php.ini values.

There have been countless examples posted in various places (Reddit, Hacker News, Twitter, Facebook, Slashdot, and even LinkedIn group discussions), and while a handful occasionally contain one or two tips that might be beneficial towards securing your PHP applications, almost all of the advice they contain is either wrong, a huge waste of time, downright silly, or all of above.

As part of a team that specializes in application security (in particular: securing PHP applications), I feel it's high time someone cleared the air about this advice.

https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/01/configuration-driven-php-security-advice-considered-harmful

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In a new post on his blog Adam Wathan explains his thinking on the meaning of having a method on an object.

The fundamental misunderstanding here is thinking that methods are things an object can do.

If you believe that the methods on an object represent the abilities of that object, then of course an Announcement having a broadcast() method sounds silly.

But what if methods weren't the things an object could do? What if they were the things you could do with that object?

If methods were the actions an object afforded us, then it would make perfect sense to be able to broadcast() an Announcement, wouldn't it?

https://adamwathan.me/2017/01/24/methods-are-affordances-not-abilities/

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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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Matthieu Napoli, author of PHP-DI and externals.io, wrote a post on how you can use anonymous classes to quickly create mocks, spies and fixtures.

Anonymous classes were added to PHP 7. This article intends to show how useful they can be for writing tests.

http://mnapoli.fr/anonymous-classes-in-tests/

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Freek Lijten, a developer at Schiphol, makes the case for just setting a sane default value instead of throwing an exception when invalid input entered the application.

I didn't think much of this, but I've seen a major drawback lately while working on a site that is a bit bigger than I was used to. With over half a million visitors a week and lots of scrapers, bots and other stuff visiting, these exceptions and fatal errors clog up logging quite a bit. Not to the point that we can't handle the volume, but it generates false positives in monitoring channels and it is something we do not want to act upon anyway.

http://www.freeklijten.nl/2017/01/04/Sane-defaults-over-Exceptions

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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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On his new blog on Medium, Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel, published some statistics on the code complexity of various popular PHP frameworks. Draw your own conclusion.

Last week as I was refactoring and cleaning Laravel for the 5.4 release, Graham Campbell showed me some code complexity statistics for the framework. I decided to compare this against some other PHP frameworks to see how Laravel stacks up.

https://medium.com/@taylorotwell/measuring-code-complexity-64356da605f9

Recently Taylor sat down with the folks at Larachat. Watch the recording to learn some other nice interesting tidbits about Laravel and it's ecosystem.

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