In a vanilla Laravel installation you can use language files to localize your app. The Laravel documentation refers to any string in a language file as a language line. You can fetch the value of any language line easily with Laravel's handy trans-function. trans('messages.welcome'); //…
On the Tighten blog Keith Damiani wrote an article how you can mold the dd helper to your liking.
An important part of every Laravel developer's debugging arsenal is the humble dd() helper function—"dump and die"—to output the contents of a variable and terminate execution of your code. In the browser, dd() results in a structured, easy-to-read tree, complete with little arrow buttons that can be clicked to expand or hide children of nested structures. In the terminal, however, it's a different story. ... Fortunately, it's simple to build your very own customized version of dd() to help tame your unwieldly terminal output.
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This year's Laracon EU was an amazing conference. The venue was astonishing, there were lots of cool talks and interesting people to talk to. If you're using Laravel or PHP going to this conference really is a no brainer.
If you were unable to attend or want to see the talk you missed during the conference you can now do so. The organisers have uploaded video's of all talks to their YouTube channel.
I had the honor speaking there as well. My talk was about managing backups with Laravel. Here's the video of my first ever conference talk:
At one point during my talk I show this slide on future plans for the package:
I'm proud to say that all that work is already done: version 3 of laravel-backup was made Laravel 5.3 compatible. Version 4 of the package uses Laravel 5.3's native notifications and uses PHP 7 features to keep the code clear. The db-dumper package, which is used under the hood, was rewritten and is now easier to use.
I'll definitely go to the next Laracon EU conference and hope to see you there too.
Colin Viebrock, author of the well know laravel-sluggable package, created a new Sequel Pro bundle that can genenerate Laravel migration files.
Connect to a database, and select a table in the left-hand column. From the application menu, choose Bundles › Export › Export to Laravel Migration. The resulting Laravel migration file will be saved to your desktop. You can then move this file into your Laravel project (usually /database/migrations) and then run artisan migrate.
Recently I was working an a project where, in order to use the webapp, users should first apply for an account. Potential users can fill in request form. After the request is approved by an admin they may use the app. Our client expected that the barrier to request an account should be very low.…
Last week v2 of laravel-fractal was released. This package is a developer friendly wrapper around the League's Fractal package. It a Laravel context it can be used to transform your Eloquent models to JSON output for an API. Think of it as toJson (or toArray) on steroids. This is how you can work…
I'm very happy to announce that, as of today, our Laravel and PHP packages have been downloaded a million times. We now have more than 80 packages registered on Packagist. All combined they are downloaded around 150 000 times a month, and that number seems to be growing. Our GitHub organisation has…
Over at Sitepoint, Younes Rafie wrote a tutorial on how to create a custom mail driver in Laravel 5.3. In the post he shows some code that can log all email to the database.
One of the many goodies Laravel offers is mailing. You can easily configure and send emails through multiple popular services. ... Laravel also provides a good starting point for sending mails during the development phase using the log driver, and in production using smtp, sparkpost, mailgun, etc. This seems fine in most cases, but it can’t cover all the available services! In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to extend the existing mail driver system to add our own.
https://www.sitepoint.com/mail-logging-in-laravel-5-3-extending-the-mail-driver/
My colleague Seb needed to convert some color values in PHP. He looked around for some good packages, but there weren't any that fit the bill. So guess what he did? He just created a new package called spatie/color. Here's what it can do: $rgb = Rgb::fromString('rgb(55,155,255)'); echo…
I've been using PHP for quite some time now, and I had never heard of class_alias before reading this post by Fabian Schmengler.
Sometimes you want to rename a class or move it to a different namespace. But as soon as it is used anywhere outside the package, this is breaking backwards compatibility and should not be done lightheartedly.Luckily there is a way in PHP to have both, the old class and the new class, while deprecating the old one: class_alias().
Jarek Tkaczyk wrote a blogpost on the usage of accessors in Eloquent. He demonstrates what could go wrong when using accessors on certain fields.
The moral of the story is, that data handling and its presentation should not go into the same bucket. And the model is that bucket – instead of creating accessors, traits or god knows what for this task, better use decorator (like) pattern where you can do all the necessary work for preparing your data to be displayed in your view, without touching actual values anywhere else.
https://softonsofa.com/they-can-bite-how-not-to-use-accessors-in-eloquent/
Keep this in mind when you should use my pragmatic approach for presenters. Watch out for conflicting names.
In the Laravel template that we use to kickstart all our client projects at Spatie, I recently changed the way we handle presenters. Instead of using Jeffrey Way's popular presenter package we now use simple traits. In this post I want to give some background on that change. In case you've never…
A new major version of laravel-backup was recently tagged. This package can backup files and databases of your Laravel app (or any PHP application really). The backup consists of a zipfile containing a dump of the databases and all files that are selected for backup. The package will copy over the…
Laravel Shift is a paid service that can upgrade a Laravel project. I've used it a couple of times. Although some manually work is needed to complete the upgrade, it has saved me many hours. The service has recently shifted it's 1000th project, a major milestone. In a post on his blog Jason shares how he started the service and where it's going in the future.
In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.
http://jason.pureconcepts.net/2016/09/laravel-shift-1000-applications-upgraded/
A new version of PHP is always the right time to fix or enhance some syntax specific points, or to add some minor new features to the language. Here are some of the changes for PHP 7.1 that I noticed the most.
https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-syntax-and-consistency.html
Eric Barnes of Laravel News wrote a good tutorial on how to create a sitemap with Laravel.
A few years ago search engines recommended submitted sitemaps to help with indexing your website and now the importance of this is debatable.I’m of the mindset creating and submitting can’t hurt, so I spent a little time putting one together and wanted to share how easy this is in Laravel.
Joe Ferguson shares a tip on how to make a version of PHPUnit's assertArraySubset where the order of the array does not matter.
The problem with this test is that `assertArraySubset()` will fail if the items in the array are out of order. And since we don’t have an `ORDER BY` on our query in our data source we cannot guarantee the order of the returned data.
PHP 7.1 is nearing completion. A few days ago Release Candidate 1 was released. One of the areas that got some love from the developers is the type system. Pascal Martin wrote a blogpost about those changes.
One of the most important changes PHP 7.0 brought us last year was about typing, with the introduction of scalar type-declarations for functions/methods parameters and their return value. PHP 7.1 adds to those type-declarations, with several points that were missing in the previous version of the language.
https://blog.pascal-martin.fr/post/php71-en-types.html
That new iterable pseudo-type will sure come in handy.
If you want to know what's changed regarding error handling, Pascal has got that covered as well.
In the beginning of the summer the Belgian company PHPro held a cool hacking contest. The persons the could hack a special site that they had set up could win a prize. Yesterday they published an interesting article on how that site could be hacked. The site was also hacked in ways that the developers of the company did not anticipate.
Since this contest started out as an internal project, we've put a lot of focus on the flow on how to hack the website. It was just a little side project to inform our colleagues that some small mistakes can end up in a big catastrophe. By focussing on the flow of the hackme contest, we forgot to secure the application for malicious contestants. Off course, this was something that fired back to us on the first days of the competition. Here is a little write-up of the problems we've encountered and how we fixed them.
