Freek Van der Herten has posted a guide to sending an email in a Larvel Spark-based system to remind a user that their trial of a service is expiring soon. In this case, it's a monitoring service he offers called Oh Deal.

I'm currently building a webapp named Laravel Spark, a Laravel based template to kick off SaaS projects. It offers logic for organising users into teams, handles trial periods, subscriptions, payments, invoices and much more.

[...] Unfortunately, Spark will not send out a mail to team owners whose teams are in trial periods that will soon expire. Luckily it's easy to add that yourself. I'll show you how to do just that in this post. Along the way, you'll learn some good general tips for sending out emails in batches. Let's get started!

He then starts in on the code, showing first how to locate the teams that should be sent the email. He adds a new field to track when the email was sent and the code required to send the actual email. He shows how to make the command restartable, create the "Mailable" class and the command to send the actual email.

The Laravel News site has posted a new announcement today with a reminder that today (Feb 22nd) is the last day to get Laracon Online Early Bird tickets for just $10 USD. After this they'll go up to their normal price.

Today is the last chance for you to join over 3,000 developers and get an early bird ticket to Laracon Online for just $10. Each ticket purchase includes access to the live event video, conference swag, and a special Slack channel for hanging out and mingling during the event. With your ticket, you can sit on your couch and watch it all live!

Laracon Online will be held on March 8th, 2017 with opening remarks at 8:45 AM EST. If you can’t attend that day, all the talks will be recorded and available online for viewing at your convenience shortly after the conference ends.

The post also lists out some of the "conference swag" that will be provided to attendees including a discount on Linode services, a Blackfire.io discount and others that require a bit of action on your part but offer large discounts as a result. You can find out more about the event on the main conference website.

Chris Hartjes has a new (sad) post on his site today sharing news about the True North PHP conference, the "first PHP-centric event in the Greater Toronto Area since 2006" - the organizers have made the decision to end the conference's run after five years.

Why are you stopping the conference?!?"

This is the most common question I've been asked since earlier in the year when my conference partner Pete and I decided that we would run our small PHP-centric conference TrueNorthPHP one more time and then shut it down.

[...] But why did I go along with shutting down such an awesome event. Sure, I could keep doing this another 5 times. But I'm just not wired this way.

He gets into the details about why the conference was started, the work that he and Peter Meth put into the project and why they made the decision to no longer run the event. Chris talks about how his "restlessness" played into the decision and how, despite the conference being a success for several years, it was time for him to move on to another challenge.