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Laravel Passport is an easy to use OAuth2 server that was released alongside Laravel 5.3. Mohamed Said wrote an excellent guest post at Laravel News about the grant types used in Passport.

OAuth2 is a security framework that controls access to protected areas of an application, and it’s mainly used to control how different clients consume an API ensuring they have the proper permissions to access the requested resources.

Laravel Passport is a full OAuth2 server implementation; it was built to make it easy to apply authentication over an API for laravel-based web applications.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/passport-grant-types/

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I've seen two different tips for speeding up your tests in Laravel in the past week and thought I'd share them with you. For me, they made a significant impact on the speed of my tests.

https://driesvints.com/blog/two-tips-to-speedup-your-laravel-tests/

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Recently Eric L. Barnes put a new coat of paint on Laravel News. Behind the scenes there were some changes as well. In a new post he explains how he integrated the Wordpress backend with a Laravel app.

Last week I relaunched Laravel News, and the new site is running on Laravel with WordPress as the backend. I’ve been using WordPress for the past two years, and I’ve grown to enjoy the features that it provides. The publishing experience, the media manager, the mobile app, and Jetpack for tracking stats.

I wasn’t ready to give these features up, and I didn’t have the time to build my own system, so I decided to keep WordPress and just use an API plugin to pull all the content I needed out, then store it in my Laravel application. In this tutorial, I wanted to outline how I set it all up.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/wordpress-api-with-laravel/

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In this post I'd like to share a quick tip on how you can improve the readability of your code with array_filter.

Today I was working on some code that looked something like this:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        $address = [
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'location' => $this->location,
        ];

        if ($this->line2 != '') {
            $address['line2'] = $this->line2;
        }

        if ($this->busNumber != '') {
            $address['busNumber'] = $this->busNumber;
        }

        if ($this->country != '') {
            $address['country'] = $this->country;
        }


        return $address;
    }
}

Did you know that you can use array_filter to clean this up? I didn't, until today.

When that function is called without a second argument it will remove any element that contains a falsy value (so null, or an empty string) Here's the refactored, equivalent code:

class Address
{
    ...

    public function toArray()
    {
        return array_filter([
            'name' => $this->name,
            'street' => $this->street,
            'line2' => $this->line2,
            'busNumber' => $this->busNumber,
            'location' => $this->location,
            'country' => $this->country,
        ]);
    }
}

That's much better!

Just be careful when using this with numeric data that you want to keep in the array. 0 is considered as a falsy value too, so it'll be removed as well.

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Joind.in is a website where attendees can leave feedback for speakers delivering talks and conferences and user groups. This feedback is very useful for the speakers who which improve their skills. In my mind it is an essential part of the PHP ecosystem.

For the last 6 years Lorna Jane Mitchell and Rob Allen have maintained the project. They are now looking for others to take over their duties.

This post is about the open source project, Joind.in. Joind.in is a tool to allow attendees at conferences or other events to offer immediate public feedback to speakers and organisers at those events. Joind.in is an open source project run by volunteers. For the last 6 years I've been a maintainer of this project, following a year or two of being a contributor. Over the last few months, myself and my comaintainer Rob Allen have been mostly inactive due to other commitments, and we have agreed it's time to step aside and let others take up the baton.

http://lornajane.net/posts/2016/joind-in-needs-help

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In a new post on his site, Christoph Rumpel explains how you can quickly build a Facebook chatbot with PHP.

The chatbot topic is huge right now. Finally there is something quite new again and nobody knows what's happening next. This is the perfect time to start experimenting with chatbots and to build your own one right now. Give me 10 minutes of your time and I will give you your first chatbot!

http://christoph-rumpel.com/2016/08/build-a-php-chatbot-in-10-minutes/

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In a new post on his blog Jason McCreary, creator of Laravel Shift, wrote down the summary of his Laracon US talk.

I consider myself a searcher. On a quest to find the Holy Grail of programming practices - that single practice which instantly levels up my skills. While I know this doesn’t exist, I do believe in a set of practices. Recently, I found one to be YAGNI.

YAGNI is a principle of eXtreme Programming - something I practice daily at work. YAGNI is an acronym for You Aren’t Gonna Need It. It states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. In theory, this seems straightforward, but few programmers practice it.

http://jason.pureconcepts.net/2016/08/practicing-yagni/

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Earlier today laravel-news.com, the official Laravel news source, received a new coat of paint. In a post announcing the launch Eric shares how the site works behind the curtains.

During this move, I have redone the way the site is powered. Previously it ran on WordPress with a custom theme I put together, it worked fine but added new features, and sections became harder and harder, and I wanted the ability to use what I am comfortable with, Laravel. However, I didn’t want to give up the media library and editing experience of WordPress.

So to have the best of both worlds I kept the old site on WordPress and used the WP Rest API paired with the Laravel Scheduler. This allows me to automatically sync data from WordPress into my database without having to rebuild an entire CMS admin area. I have the same setup for the podcast section, and it hooks into the Simplecast API to pull those over.

https://laravel-news.com/2016/08/welcome-to-the-next-version-of-laravel-news/

I sure would like to read a tutorial on how that sync works in detail.

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Laravel-Mediable is a package to upload and handle all sorts of files (aka media) in a Laravel app. It was built by a Canadian based web agency called Plank.

With it you can do things like this:

$media = MediaUploader::fromSource($request->file('thumb'))
    ->toDestination('uploads', 'post/thumbnails')
    ->upload();

$post = Post::create($this->request->input());
$post->attachMedia($media, ['thumbnail']);

Pretty cool. You can read more on the way and how the package was built in an introductory post on the Plank blog.

At Spatie we've also built our own solution for handling media. In Plank's blogpost Sean lists these differences between their package and our Medialibrary.

Since our medialibary was introduced I've been asked from time to time why our medialibrary uses a many-to-one polymorphic relationship. The answer is: simplicity.

A previous iteration of our Blender CMS (a version that used Zend Framework 1 instead of Laravel ?) had a screen where the user could pick a file from all uploaded files (it looked much like this wordpress screen). We saw that, after having set up a lot of sites with Blender, that almost none of our clients used that screen...

In our projects we also see that our clients mostly need to attach an image, or a pdf or whatever, ... to only one model (for instance a news item). It rarely happens that a client wants to attach the same file to different models.

In our code we want to handle that use case as simple as possible and that's why we preferred using a many-to-one relation over a many-to-many relation. All the other differences listed in Plank's post are caused by the same reasoning, we preferred simplicity and ease of use over flexibility.

If you're looking for a good solution to handle media in a Laravel app I suggest you take a look at both our Medialibrary and Plank's Mediable package. Both packages are good at what they do. Pick the one that best fits your project (and just feels good to you).

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An older but still relevant post by Evert Pot on why and how you should also test your packages with the lowest versions of it's dependencies.

In some projects, there may be packages lying around that are not the latest version. This could be because it introduced some BC break, or introduced a bug.

If other packages also use the package that’s being held back, they may get an older version as a dependency.

So for package maintainers, they will want to find out if their package correctly works with the oldest package they claim to support.

https://evertpot.com/testing-composer-prefer-lowest/

EDIT: Here's another old, but also still relevant, blogpost on the subject by Cees-Jan Kiewiet:

https://blog.wyrihaximus.net/2015/06/test-lowest-current-and-highest-possible-on-travis/

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With vanilla PHP it's possible to check of if the SSL certificate of a given site is valid. But it's kinda madness to do it. Let's look at the code required:

<br />// Step 1: downloading the certificate from the site
$streamContext = stream_context_create([
    'ssl' => [
        'capture_peer_cert' => true,
    ],
]);

$client = stream_socket_client(
    "ssl://spatie.be:443",
    $errorNumber,
    $errorDescription,
    $timeout,
    STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT,
    $streamContext);

$response = stream_context_get_params($client);

$certificateProperties = openssl_x509_parse($response['options']['ssl']['peer_certificate']);

// Step 2: parsing the certificate

/*
* I'm not even going to type out the further code needed.
*
* `$certificateProperties` has two keys `validFrom_time_t` and `validTo_time_t`. 
* Those keys contain the UTC representation of the date.
* You will need to check if the current date is between those dates.
*/ 

What. The. Actual. F. Let's fix this!

We've released a new package named spatie/ssl-certificate that makes checking the SSL certificate of a site laughably easy. Let's take a look at the code:

$certificate = SslCertificate::createForHostName('spatie.be');
$certificate->isValid(); // returns true if the certificate is currently valid

Boom, done.

The package has a few more methods that makes working with an SSL certificate a breeze:

$certificate->getIssuer(); // returns "Let's Encrypt Authority X3"

$certificate->getDomain(); // returns "spatie.be"

//A certificate can cover multiple (sub)domains. Here's how to get them.
$certificate->getAdditionalDomains(); // returns ["spatie.be", "www.spatie.be]

$this->certificate->validFromDate(); // returns an instance of Carbon

$certificate->getExpirationDate(); // returns an instance of Carbon

You can also use isValid to determine if a given domain is covered by the certificate. Of course it'll keep checking if the current datetime is between validFromDate and expirationDate.

$this->certificate->isValid('spatie.be'); // returns true
$this->certificate->isValid('laravel.com'); // returns false

The source code of the package is available on GitHub. My company has made many more PHP framework agnostic, Laravel and JavaScript packages in the past. Take a look at the open source page at our site to see if we've made anything that could be of use to you.

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Apache Solr is a high performance search engine much like Elastic. On his blog Peter Steenbergen explains how you can use Solr in a Laravel app.

This is my second blog in a series about SOLR with the PHP Solarium library. My first blog was about the usage of OR filters to create Multi-Select facets with SOLR. With this blog item I will show you how easy it is to implement the PHP Solarium library in the Laravel framework.

http://petericebear.github.io/laravel-php-solarium-integration-20160725/

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In a post on masterzendframework.com Matthew Setter shares his experiences with building the same application in both Laravel and Zend Expression.

The reason being, is that you can't give a straight yes or no answer. It's like asking: is desktop Linux as easy as Windows? The presumption there is that you want to do exactly the same thing in Linux as you can with Windows.

Well, if you wanted the exact same experience on Linux, as you get with Windows, then use Windows! As you're working with two different systems, two different approaches to solving the same challenge, then the end result may be the same — but how they work will naturally be different.

So it is with Laravel and Zend Expressive. They're two exceptional PHP frameworks which can be used to create similar applications. Yet they were designed with different preconceptions about how an application's should be put together. They were designed for different developer mindsets. And the list goes on.

So, whilst I was able to create the same application, roughly about the same size, the way they were developed was different.

http://www.masterzendframework.com/zend-expressive-or-laravel/

I'm currently perfectly happy in the Laravel ecosystem, so I won't be making a switch soon. But I like to keep an eye out on how other frameworks and communities are doing things to learn from that.

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PHP 7.1 will have a neat function to create closures from callables. Joseph Silber explains the function and offers some good examples on his blog.

With PHP 5.5 going EOL earlier this week and the PHP 7.1 beta expected later this month, now sounds like a good time to look into a neat little feature coming in 7.1: easily converting any callable into a proper Closure using the new Closure::fromCallable() method.

• A short refresher on closures in PHP
• When you need to convert a callable to a Closure
• Introducing Closure::fromCallable()
• Creating a closure that wraps a private method

https://josephsilber.com/posts/2016/07/13/closure-from-callable-in-php-7-1

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