Laravel Dev·27wLaravel Best Practices Every Developer Should Follow
Seven essential practices for maintaining clean Laravel codebases: keeping controllers lightweight by moving logic to service classes, using Form Request classes for validation, following naming conventions, preventing N+1 queries with eager loading, storing configuration in environment files, maintaining organized migrations and seeders, and writing basic tests using Laravel's built-in tools.
Laravel News·26wPHP 8.5 Introduces a New URI Extension
PHP 8.5 adds a built-in URI extension that provides standards-compliant parsing for both RFC 3986 and WHATWG URL standards. The extension includes Uri and Url classes with methods for parsing, normalizing, and manipulating URLs, with proper error handling through exceptions or referenced error arrays. Laravel applications can already use similar functionality through Laravel's URI class (available since 11.35), which wraps the league/uri package implementing RFC 3986.
Laravel News·28wCraft CMS is moving to Laravel
Craft CMS announced at their Dot All conference that version 6 will be built on Laravel instead of Yii 2. The transition includes a Yii 2 adapter package to minimize breaking changes for existing plugins and modules. Craft 6 will introduce content releases, scheduled drafts, content importing, approval workflows, edit page commenting, element activity logs, and a redesigned UI with dark mode. Beta release is planned for Q3 2026, with general availability in Q4 2026.
Laravel Daily·24wWhere Are All NEW Laravel/PHP Devs? (and what can we do)
Analysis of declining interest in PHP and Laravel among new developers, based on community feedback from Twitter and LinkedIn. Key factors include fewer high-paying job opportunities compared to Python and JavaScript, negative brand perception and 'dead language' stereotypes, limited presence in educational institutions and bootcamps, AI code generators defaulting to JavaScript frameworks, steeper learning curve for beginners, and paid ecosystem components. Proposes solutions including creating content for non-PHP audiences, showcasing business success stories, improving onboarding experience, and engaging with broader developer communities beyond the existing PHP bubble.
stitcher.io·25wStitcher.io
A refactoring case study that simplified a content scheduling system by eliminating a state transition and cron job. The original design used three states (PENDING, SCHEDULED, PUBLISHED) with automated transitions, requiring cron jobs, console commands, and complex logic. The refactor removed the SCHEDULED state and added a future-dated publicationDate field to PUBLISHED posts, using a SQL query to find available time slots. This eliminated moving parts like cron jobs and automatic state transitions, trading one type of complexity for another. The key insight: modeling software directly from human processes doesn't always yield the simplest technical solution.
stitcher.io·24wMy wishlist for PHP in 2026
A PHP developer outlines desired language features for 2026, prioritizing PHP Editions (opt-in breaking changes per namespace inspired by Rust), interface default methods for more flexible code organization, generics for type-safe collections, and structs for simpler data representation. The author acknowledges that backwards compatibility constraints slow feature adoption and create compromises, suggesting editions could enable experimental features and gradual migration. Previously desired features like scalar objects and unified function signatures are deemed unlikely or abandoned.
Laravel Dev·28wQuick Wins to Speed Up Your Laravel App
Five practical optimization techniques for Laravel applications: implementing configuration and route caching, fixing N+1 database queries with eager loading and proper indexing, offloading heavy tasks to queues, enabling OPcache for PHP compilation, and removing unused dependencies. These straightforward improvements can significantly boost application performance without complex refactoring.
Laravel News·27wHttp Client Batch Method in Laravel 12.32
Laravel 12.32.0 introduces HTTP batch requests with lifecycle callbacks for concurrent request handling, an afterRollback database callback for transaction rollback handling, batch job failure callbacks for granular error management, and response-based rate limiting to control throttling based on HTTP responses rather than just requests. Additional improvements include SQS FIFO queue support and various bug fixes.
FREEK.DEV·26wThe Downsides of Dynamic Method Calls in PHP
Dynamic method calls in PHP allow calling methods by variable names at runtime, but introduce risks including reduced code readability, harder debugging, potential security vulnerabilities, and loss of IDE support for autocompletion and static analysis. Understanding these tradeoffs helps developers make informed decisions about when dynamic calls are appropriate.
JetBrains·28wMoving PHP open source forward
JetBrains announces a new structured approach to PHP open-source sponsorships, committing to support approximately five projects annually. For 2025-2026, they're sponsoring developers working on Mago (a Rust-based PHP linter), PHPStan, Rector, AI/MCP exploration in PHP, and 3v4l.org. They continue supporting the PHP Foundation while transitioning away from sponsoring Xdebug and CodeSniffer to diversify their support across more projects over time.
Laravel News·24wOptimizing Queries with Memoization
Duplicate cache calls waste time even when cached. Laravel's Cache::memo() stores results in memory during a single request, eliminating redundant cache reads. Using Laravel Telescope to identify duplicate cache hits, you can implement memoization to reduce three 8ms cache calls down to one, with minimal code changes through a MemoizedCacheService wrapper.
Collections·25wExploring the Features of PHP 8.5
PHP 8.5 is scheduled for release on November 20th, 2025, introducing several developer-focused enhancements. Key features include the Pipe operator for chaining callables, native array_first() and array_last() functions, a URI extension for standards-compliant URL parsing, Closure::getCurrent() for recursive closures, and support for closures in constant expressions. The release also adds default backtraces for fatal errors and an INI diff option to streamline debugging and configuration management.
PHP Dev·24wHetzner Laravel now has full documentation available!
Hetzner Laravel, a tool for managing Hetzner servers with Laravel, now features comprehensive documentation to help developers get started quickly. The documentation is open-source and available for community contributions, alongside the main GitHub repository.
Laravel Dev·26wLaravel Seeder & Migration Best Practices
Eight practical guidelines for managing Laravel database migrations and seeders effectively. Covers reversible migrations, avoiding edits to deployed migrations, preventing duplicate seeded data using methods like updateOrCreate, organizing seeders into focused classes, separating development and production seed data with environment checks, leveraging factories for test data, and using migrate:fresh --seed for clean rebuilds. Emphasizes idempotent seeders and maintaining clean database history for stable, reproducible environments.
Laravel News·26wRector Rules for Laravel
Rector for Laravel is a PHP tool extension that automates code upgrades and refactoring for Laravel applications. It offers automatic version-based rule application, step-by-step upgrade paths between Laravel versions, and specific rulesets for improving code quality. Features include replacing conditional statements with helper functions (abort_if, throw_if), adding type hints for better type safety, and numerous configurable rules for Laravel-specific optimizations.
Laravel News·26wDetect Packages & Approaches in use within a project with Laravel Roster
Laravel Roster is a package from the Laravel core team that scans projects to detect which Laravel ecosystem packages are installed and their versions. It provides a simple API to query package information, filter by production or development dependencies, and check for specific packages and versions. The tool is primarily used internally by the Laravel team and comes bundled with Laravel Boost.
ACF·26wACF 6.6.1
Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) 6.6.1 patch release fixes several issues including Color Picker palette display with large custom color sets, WYSIWYG field rendering in ACF Blocks, block render function type signatures, and multiple V3 Blocks problems affecting preview updates, widget editor compatibility, DOM rendering, and field display consistency.
FREEK.DEV·24wDeferred Queue Driver in Laravel 12.35
Laravel 12.35 adds a new deferred queue driver that executes queued jobs immediately after sending the HTTP response to the user. This allows developers to offload work from the request cycle without requiring separate queue workers, improving perceived response times while maintaining the benefits of asynchronous processing.
Product Hunt·28wLaravel: The PHP Framework for Web Artisans
Laravel Forge is a server management and deployment platform that provisions fully configured servers in seconds, supports zero-downtime deployments, and handles multiple sites on a single VPS. It includes instant setup for Nginx, PHP, MySQL/Postgres, and Redis, with flat-rate pricing and team collaboration features through RBAC. The platform supports Laravel, WordPress, Next.js, and Nuxt.js deployments across various cloud providers or custom servers.
stitcher.io·24wStitcher.io
JetBrains developed a strategy to sponsor five PHP open source projects annually for sustained impact. The initiative aims to lead by example, encouraging companies relying on PHP to allocate small budgets ($100/month) toward open source sponsorships. Companies can identify projects through their composer.json dependencies, focusing on actively maintained projects with limited existing sponsorship.