Freek.dev

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spatie

All my posts about spatie.

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Mailcoach has a beautiful new coat of paint!

Mailcoach is our premium mail service that allows you to send newsletters, build powerful email automation, and send transactional mail. It truly can cover all your mailing needs.

Unlike most competitors, we only price by the number of emails you send and not by how large your subscriber list is.

After having revamped our marketing pages last month, we’re launching our new beautiful UI for the app today. Let’s take a closer look at all the changes.

A fresh look

Let’s dive straight in; here’s what a list of subscribers now looks like.

If you’ve used Mailcoach previously, you’ll notice immediately that this screen has been redesigned from scratch. The colors, font, and general layout have all been updated to reflect the design we introduced to our marketing pages.

Behind the scenes, we use Filament to render those tables. We’ve highly customized how they look, so you don’t have the feeling you’re looking at the stock tables. Of course, every list has powerful sorting, search, bulk actions, and filtering options that you know and love from Filament.

Easy to use automations

Email automation is one of Mailcoach's most powerful features. Using automations, you can build up any email flow you might need. You might also know this as “drip campaigns.”

We’ve totally revamped how automations look. Here’s a simple automation that sends mail 10 minutes after someone signs up.

At Spatie, we use this feature to send a couple of emails during the trial period on Flare.

The real power of automations comes into play when using branching logic. For Flare, we’ll automatically invite people who are subscribed after two months since onboarding to our affiliate program.

Self-hosted Mailcoach

Next to the hosted version of Mailcoach, we also offer a self-hosted version. This version has been updated as well. Because we need to update every view, we decided to tag it as a new major version. You’ll find the upgrade notes here.

In closing

With both the Mailcoach marketing pages and the Mailcoach app itself updated to the new design, we feel the Mailcoach platform is on another level now.

Take a look for yourself by starting a free 14-day trial.

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Creating beautiful invoices using Tailwind and Laravel PDF original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Last week, we released a new package called Laravel PDF that allows you to transform Blade views into PDFs. Under the hood, Chromium is used to perform the transformation. Because Chromium is an up-to-date browser, you can use any modern CSS you like.

Some people have asked if they can use Tailwind to style their documents. And I’m happy to report you can. Let’s take a look at a minimal example to showcase this.

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Easily create PDFs in Laravel apps original

by Freek Van der Herten – 6 minute read

We’ve released a new package called spatie/laravel-pdf, a batteries-included package to generate PDFs in Laravel apps. Under the hood, it uses Chromium to generate PDFs from Blade views. You can use modern CSS features like grid, flexbox, and even frameworks like Tailwind to create beautiful PDFs.

In this post, I’d like to introduce and demonstrate the package.

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New major versions for spatie/image and Laravel Media Library have been released original

by Freek Van der Herten – 11 minute read

We’ve released a new major version of spatie/image, v3. This package makes it very easy to manipulate images using PHP.

At the same time, we’ve also released a new major version of spatie/laravel-medialibrary. This is a powerhouse package that can associate all kinds of files with Eloquent models. The latest version of this package now uses spatie/image v3 under the hood for manipulating images.

In this blog post, I’ll explain why we made new major versions and how they can be used.

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Craft emails that look good in each email client using MJML original

by Freek Van der Herten – 5 minute read

In a perfect world, email clients can render HTML as good as major browsers. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Email clients don't support modern HTML and CSS niceties and have a lot of quirks to be mindful of. Making sure an HTML email looks good in the most used email clients takes a lot of work.

To make crafting HTML emails a lot more enjoyable, the folks at Mailjet created a solution called MJML, which stands for "Mailjet Markup Language." It's an easy-to-use abstraction layer over HTML.

We have created a new package called spatie/mjml-php to easily convert MJML to HTML using PHP. If you're using Sidecar, you'll be happy to know that we've also created a package called spatie/mjml-sidecar, to convert MJML to HTML using Sidecar.

In this blog post, I'd like to introduce the package to you.

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