Laravel Daily #29: Email, Elasticsearch and Taylor's answers

Tip from Laravel Daily blog

One of the problem with database migrations in Laravel is developers rarely actually test “down” migrations – even when testing we usually re-generate the whole schema from scratch instead of launching down() functions. Therefore I would advice to check something before doing down migrations.

If you wanted to ask any question to a Laravel creator himself, here's the Q&A with Taylor Otwell - he answers the most common questions about Laravel and his own workflow.

Sending emails in web applications has become so essential. Marketing, notifications, newsletters, adverts, etc are some of the reasons why we send emails to our clients. I'd say the majority of websites send automated emails at least via a "Contact us" form.

Consistency is one of the most important aspects to consider when building an API. You often find yourself returning 2 types of responses; one for success and one for errors. As you can see, we are returning error responses in a specific format, and success responses in a different format.

Laravel’s find() method works great in a perfect world, but what happens if the user attempts to access a record that doesn’t exist, such as /lists/23245? The find method would return a null value, meaning any attempts to retrieve a property of a non-object within the view would result in a vie

A curated list of awesome bookmarks, packages, tutorials, videos and other cool resources from the Laravel ecosystem.

Packages

Form builder for Laravel 5 inspired by Symfony's form builder. With help of Laravels FormBuilder class creates forms that can be easy modified and reused. By default it supports Bootstrap 3. Creating form classes is easy. With a simple artisan command:

APIs are cool, & laravel can handle all the coolness you may desire. Here we talk about building an API for third party applications and allowing them to communicate with your application on behalf of users.

This talk will examine a real business case, where increased data analytics demands required a change of database. The team adopted Elasticsearch to replace MySQL for our social media analytics platform, Blurrt.

I needed a few days ago a way to get my twitter followers’ count for an app and I did a small research on StackOverflow. One of the advices was to use another service for that, because the twitter API doesn’t support that anymore.

There are times when there’s a need for running a group of tasks automatically at certain times in the future. These tasks are usually administrative, but could be anything – from making database backups to downloading emails when everyone is asleep.

Yesterday I ran a Twitter poll to see how many have moved to PHP7. With 650 votes here are the results: Twitter poll: Is your company on PHP 7 yet?

I recently learned about a couple of features of composer that I thought I'd write down here so that I don't forget them! I also had to deal with a conflict in composer.lock recently, so I've noted how I solved that too.

tl;dr: Producer will look over your Composer-based library package just before you are ready to tag it for release, make sure it appears ready-to-go, and then do the release for you through Github, Gitlab, or Bitbucket. Producer works with both Git and Mercurial.