The NetTuts.com site has posted a list of their five hidden gems in Laravel, a popular PHP framework. They look at a wide range of these "hidden" features that can help make your Laravel experience even better.

Many developers who use Laravel are probably only barely scratching the surface of what the framework has to offer. While the documentation does cover the most common use cases and the obvious features, it doesn’t cover everything. Don’t get me wrong, the documentation is fine, it’s just that there’s so much you can do, it’s hard to document everything. Because of that, we're going to take a look at some of the hidden gems that lurk within Laravel.

The five items on their list come complete with summaries about the feature, when they were added, if they're documented and a code sample with them in use:

• Cascading Views
• Collections (with sorting, filtering and pagination)
• Regular Expression Filters
• The Message Bag
• Fluent

On the GitHub Support forums Kastner has proposed an idea - making something similar to gethub gems but for PHP:

Just like ruby/gems, PHP has a packaging/distribution system called PEAR. I think that running a pear channel would help the PHP community with things like GPL extensions, as well as increasing participation in the community. Thoughts?

There's already thirteen comments on the post, all supportive of the idea including interest from the GitHub folks themselves.