Native image lazy-loading for the web!
Did you know modern browsers can lazy load images out of the box? Laravel-medialibrary now supports this too.
Read more [addyosmani.com]
Mailcoach v2 has been released with support for custom HTML editors and multiple mailers original
A couple of months ago, my team released Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out newsletters. It sends out mail via services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, Sendgrid, and Postmark. It can optionally track opens and clicks. When your email list grows, this is a much more cost-effective solution when compared to a service like Mailchimp.
Mailcoach can be used as a premium Laravel package or as a stand-alone app. When installed into a Laravel app, it can be greatly customized. The Mailcoach stand alone app can be used without knowing how to program.
Today we're releasing v2 of Mailcoach. It offers support for Laravel 7, html editors, and multiple mailers, together with a bunch of quality of life improvements. In this blog post, I'd like to walk you through these features and show some technical details.
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Pass Typescript-like Typed Objects and Arrays to Your Laravel Functions by Leveraging Data Transfer Objects
Leonel Elimpe explains how you can use our DTO package.
Read more [github.com]
Laravel Tail can now tail remote logs original
laravel-tail is one of my favourite packages. When installed in a Laravel app it can be used to tail the log file. To tail a log file locally, you just have to issue this command: php artisan tail and it'll start tailing the latest log file (so it works for both daily and single log files). Any line…
laravel-event-sourcing v3 has been released original
Our spatie/laravel-event-sourcing package is probably the best starting point for event sourcing in Laravel. It has excellent docs, that explain event sourcing from scratch, support for aggregates, projectors, and much more! It's all beautifully integrated in Laravel.
Recently we released v3 of the package. In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through the changes.
A PHP package to execute commands via SSH original
Our team released a new package called spatie/ssh. This package allows you to execute commands via an SSH connection.
Manage Docker containers using PHP original
Last week, my colleague Ruben and I released a package called spatie/docker, that makes it easy to spin up docker containers and execute commands on them. In this blog post, I'd like to introduce what you can do with it and why we built this.
Pragmatically testing multi-guard authentication in Laravel original
Last week our team launched Mailcoach, a self-hosted solution to send out email campaigns and newsletters. Rather than being the end, laughing something is the beginning of a journey. Users start encountering bugs and ask for features that weren't considered before.
One of those features requests we got, is the ability the set the guard to be used when checking if somebody is allowed to access the Mailcoach UI.
In this blog post, I'd like to show you how we implemented and tested this.
Building Mailcoach original
Today, our team released Mailcoach, a beautiful, self-hosted mailing list manager. It integrates with services like Amazon SES, Mailgun, or Sendgrid to send out mailings affordably. It’s packaged as a stand-alone app, or can be integrated into a Laravel project, it's perfect for bloggers, artisans, and entrepreneurs.
Even if you're not in the market for an email solution, Mailcoach includes a video course on how it’s built. I'm sure you'll see some valuable techniques that you can bring to your own project.
In this blogpost, I'd like to share why and how we've built this.
📺 Building filters using laravel-query-builder original
On the subscribers screens of the Mailcoach, you can filter out the subscribers that have a certain status, you can search and sort them.
In the video below, which is part of the upcoming Mailcoach video course, I explain how we built these filters, powered by three of our packages: laravel-query-builder, query-string and Blade X.
Using view models
Brent explains what view models are and how you can use them. We use view models in almost every project at Spatie.
In essence, view models are simple classes that take some data, and transform it into something usable for the view. In this chapter 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 our projects.
Read more [stitcher.io]
A recap of 2019 original
A year ago, I wrote a recap of 2018. Now that 2019 is coming to a close, I thought it might be fun to write a similar post on what I did this year.
Streaming a large export as a CSV file to the browser original
A while ago, I created an easy to use framework agnostic PHP package to read and write CSV and Excel files called spatie/simple-excel. Behind the scenes, generators are used to ensure low memory usage, even when working with large files. Today I added a method that allows you to stream CSV files to the browser. In this small blog post, I'd like to demonstrate how you can use it.
freek.dev turns five! original
Thoughts on pricing for Mailcoach
At Spatie we currently building Mailcoach: a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. It can be used a stand alone app or as a laravel package. We'll also create a video course that explains the internals of the package. We're not going to make this software open source, but sell it. We're still are deciding on our pricing model.
Julien Bourdeau, engineer at Algolia, shares his thoughts on how it should be priced.
Today, Freek announced that they're going to release the pricing model soon and opened a conversation about what it could be. It got me thinking, and unfortunately, I couldn't fit my thought in 280 characters. First, it's important to understand that MailCoach will be 2 main things: a full-fledged app and a Laravel package.
Read more [www.sigerr.org]
Sending a welcome notification to new users of a Laravel app original
My team and I currently building Mailcoach, a solution to self-host newsletters and email campaigns. In Mailcoach you can create new users to use the app.
How should these new users be onboarded? The easy way out would be to send these new users a default password reset notification to those users, but that isn't a good first experience. The default auth scaffold by Laravel doesn't help us here: it only contains functionality to log in and to let users register themselves.
To onboard new users created by other users, I've created a package called laravel-welcome-notification which can send a welcome notification to new users that allows them to set an initial password.
In this blogpost I'd like to explain how you can use the package).
Writing open source software, and staying sane while at it
My colleague Seb lists a few very good actionale tips that help you maintaining open source software.
In the 4.5 years I’ve been a developer at Spatie, over 200 packages have been built and released by our team. I’ve done quite some authoring and maintenance over the years, and I’d like to share 8 actionable tips on writing and maintaining open source software without going insane.
Read more [sebastiandedeyne.com]
A PHP package to read and write simple Excel or CSV files original
For a couple of projects I needed to read and write a couple of very large Excel and CSV files. I didn't find a good package that does this so I decided to create one myself. Under the hood it uses generators, so memory usage will remain low, even when working with large files.
In this blogpost I'd like to walk you through spatie/simple-excel.
