On the Laravel News site there's a new post sharing twenty Eloquent tips for the Laravel users out there.

Eloquent ORM seems like a simple mechanism, but under the hood, there’s a lot of semi-hidden functions and less-known ways to achieve more with it. In this article, I will show you a few tricks.

Among the tips and "hidden features" mentioned are tips about:

• Increments and Decrements
• Model boot() method
• Model properties: timestamps, appends etc.
• Order by relationship
• Order by Mutator
• Raw query methods
• Create additional things when creating a model

...and many more. There's code examples for each of them showing them in use too.