Freek.dev

My colleague Brent released another awesome package called laravel-view-models. On his blog he shares some good examples and uses cases.

In essence, view models are simple classes that take some data, and transform it into something usable for the view. In this post I'll show you the basic principles of the pattern, we'll take a look at how they integrate in Laravel projects, and finally I'll show you how we use the pattern in one of Spatie's, our company, projects.

Read more [stitcher.io]

At Spatie We are currenlty building a new company website. One of the cool features is that it won't set a single cookie. In a new blogpost Dieter Stinglhamber explains how you can achieve this in Laravel.

Since May 25th you have been harassed by "We have updated our privacy policy" emails but also websites started to great you with "Please, let us and our 256 partners track you". In response to these abusive practices, some developers have decided to follow a better path, removing every cookie that is not needed.

Read more [dieterstinglhamber.me]

Marcel Pociot, the mind behind BotMan, has released a cool package to create visual diff in your PHPUnit tests. Under the hood it uses our Browsershot package.

I'm not sure how you feel, but I consider myself a backend developer. Sure - I know my way around Vue.JS and really enjoy working with it, but writing CSS has never been my strong point. At one of our companies recent projects, we are working together with another development team, which is mostly taking care of frontend development. So we build controllers, repositories, services, etc. and hand it over to some basic views. They handle the rest. We introduced continuous integration to them and showed them our usual workflow, when I thought that it would be excellent to also have some kind of visual CI for frontend changes.

Read more [marcelpociot.de]

Sebastian De Deyne, package creator and JavaScript wizard at Spatie, gives some good tips on how to report an issue well.

Maintaining a number of open source projects comes with a number of issues. Reporting a good issue will result in a more engaged approach from project maintainers. Don't forget: there's a human behind every project.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/a-good-issue

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Barry van Veen recently fixed an interesting performance issue at our permissions package.

Recently I was investigating the performance of an application we have built at SWIS. To my surprise, one of the most excellent costly methods was part of the spatie/laravel-permission package. After reading some more it was clearly a performance issue that could be improved upon. Since the solution was already clearly outlined it was quite easy to code it and submit a pull request.

https://barryvanveen.nl/blog/46-improving-the-performance-of-spatie-laravel-permission

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Over at Laravel News Paul Redmond, author of Docker for PHP developers, wrote a good post on how to use our RSS package to add a feed to a Laravel app.

Creating an RSS feed in Laravel isn’t the most challenging task, but using a package and a few tips can help you create an RSS feed relatively quick.

We are going to use the spatie/laravel-feed package to walk through going from a brand new Laravel 5.6 project to serving RSS feeds.

https://laravel-news.com/learn-to-create-an-rss-feeds-from-scratch-in-laravel

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Over at Laravel News Povilas Korop wrote a nice tutorial on how to use our medialibrary (we released a new major version a couple of days ago).

By default, the Laravel registration form contains only the name, email, and password, but often it’s useful to allow the user to upload a photo or an avatar. In this tutorial we will show you an easy way to add it, using Spatie’s Media Library package.

https://laravel-news.com/uploading-avatar-images

It's a good tutorial but there's a few things not mentioned. At the end of the post you'll see this line of code:

Auth::user()->getMedia('avatars')->first()->getUrl('thumb');

That can be written a bit shorter as :

Auth::user()->getFirstMediaUrl('avatars', 'thumb');

The new v7 of the medialibrary has a new feature called "single file collections", which is just perfect for this example. Take a look at the docs: https://docs.spatie.be/laravel-medialibrary/v7/working-with-media-collections/defining-media-collections#single-file-collections

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My colleague Seb did some amazing work with the creation of two packages that make it easy to get started with server side rendering in PHP. In a new post on his blog he'll tell you all about it.

Server side rendering is a hot topic when it comes to client side applications. Unfortunately, it's not an easy thing to do, especially if you're not building things in a Node.js environment.

I published two libraries to enable server side rendering JavaScript from PHP: spatie/server-side-rendering and spatie/laravel-server-side-rendering for Laravel apps.

Let's review some server side rendering concepts, benefits and tradeoffs, and build a server renderer in PHP from first principles.

https://sebastiandedeyne.com/posts/2018/server-side-rendering-javascript-from-php

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Our team is currently prepping a new version of our medialibrary. One of the highlights is support for responsive images. On his blog my colleague Brent explains what it entails and why it is important.

I want to share some thoughts on responsive images. I'll write about a certain mindset which many projects could benefit from: small- and mid-sized web projects that don't need a full blown CDN setup, but would enjoy the performance gain of responsive images.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/responsive-images-done-right

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