Like many developers, I can have quite a strong opinion about what I should or shouldn’t be doing regarding coding patterns and toolsets. A couple of years ago that opinion was a little too strong (some might say arrogant) in regards to certain ways. One of those thought patterns was that I simply couldn’t model what I wanted on Eloquent. Nothing could...

I want to be clear. I love the facade system in Laravel. It’s useful. It’s powerful. But it can also be a pain in the ass. Learning when to use, or not use facades and instead rely on dependency injection can not only help keep your code easier to maintain, but also easy to work with in the future. Don’t know what facades are? Facades in Laravel are...

Eloquence is an open source package that brings a wealth of additional features to the fantastic Eloquent library we all know and love. These features include: True camelCase support for your model attributes A count cache for related models A sum cache for related models Along with some… API improvements In 1.x, Eloquence introduced behaviours...

Wow!!! The last 18-20 months have been an absolute blast. I’ve been crazy busy, I’ve learnt a stack of new things, I’ve moved to another country and I have a heap of technical articles I want to write! So where do I begin? Let’s start with a recap. Last year (thanks to my move to London) I was able to both go to and speak at Laracon EU, 2014....

The Paginator is a great pagination tool in Laravel 4. It easily allows us to create pagination tags and urls that link to the relevant pages a user may wish to browse through when iterating through a result set. However, the Paginator appears to not be designed so well for API consumption, as are Eloquent models or Eloquent collections. So how do we...

When you have some of the leading figures in the PHP world all in one place, something special is bound to happen. Not only is the Laravel lead developer showing face (Taylor Otwell), we also have the pleasure of welcoming and listening to the likes of: Fabien Potencier (PHP good practises grand master) Phill Sparks (Laravel core developer) ...