The Scotch.io site has posted a new article sharing some of the new features and changes that are coming with Laravel 5.5, the next major release of the framework.

At the time of this writing, Laravel 5.5 is not released yet. It is slated, as the next major release, for release in July 2017. To play around with new features and changes, you need to grab the dev release of Laravel using this Laravel Installer command: laravel new project --dev

The article starts by pointing out that this version will require at least PHP 7.0, a supported and much more performant version of the language. It then covers the changes in this version including:

• the reintroduction of the "Whoops" library for debugging/error handling
• a change to vendor:publish to get a new provider prompt
• email themes
• automatic package discovery
• error page design improvements
• streamlined request validation
• exception helper functions
• model factory generators

Each of these items comes with screenshots or code examples showing the new feature at work. It also ends with a few miscellaneous updates mentioning changes in the CSRF handling and the return of a JSON stack trace for API calls.