On the Contentful blog they've posted the second part of their series reviewing static site generators for PHP. In this new article they look at Jigsaw, a Laravel-based tool.

In the first article of the series we took a look at Sculpin, the PHP static site generator which is currently the most starred on Github. Today we’re exploring Jigsaw, a tool which promises to bring a Laravel-based approach to the world of PHP static site generators (SSGs).

The author starts by sharing some about his (somewhat limited) experience with Laravel. From there he dives right in, showing the creation of a new Jigsaw site including configuration and how to serve it up locally. It then gets into detail about the directory structure of the site, asset handling and adding new content. The post ends by answering the "is it ready" question for their own needs (at Contentful).

The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has released their latest episode: Episode #65 - Jigsaws, Git tools, and Laravel development packages. In this episode Michael and Jacob also talk about:

• Puphpeteer: A Puppeteer bridge for PHP
• Node GH
• Building flexible Axios clients
• Twine: sting manipulation, levelled up

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get updates when new shows are released.

If you're a user of the Jigsaw static site generation tool from Tighten, Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site that could come in handy. He shows how to automatically create a sitemap.

There are a few tasks that are still pretty tough with static sites—for example, search, and submitting forms (which we're trying to fix with FieldGoal). But there are other tasks that are tough-but-possible, and key among them are RSS and sitemaps. Let's start with sitemaps.

There was a feature recently added to help with this allowing you to add extra "hooks" to fire when the site builds. Matt makes use of this (and this package) to create a GenerateSitemap class that goes through each item in the site and adds a link to the sitemap.xml file. He shares the code for this class and the updates to make to the configuration and bootstrapping to correctly load the class.

On the Tighten.co blog there's a new post introducing Jigsaw, a static site generator for Laravel developers they've created in the course of their own work.

That's right, Tighten has created a Laravel-based static site generator named Jigsaw, and we think it's pretty great.

Before I write another line of this post, I want to address the looming question: Why create another static site generator? In PHP alone there are two, and since we soft-launched Jigsaw there's already been another Blade-based static site generator launched.

The first part of the article lists three reasons for making the tool, pointing out the ecosystem they used (different from others), the focus on Laravel developers and the easy transition from a Jigsaw site to a full Laravel one. From there the post talks about what Jigsaw is and how you can get started using it (installation and configuration guide included). It also includes examples of "first pages" to help you get started and the result. The post finishes with a look at variable handling, custom front matter values, deployment and how to convert the site from Jigsaw to Laravel should the need arise.

The Laravel News Podcast has released their latest episode, Episode #13 hosted by PHP and Laravel community member Eric L. Barnes.

In this episode, we talk about Laravel Exception Reporter, Chrome Bandwidth limiter, Chrome extension to generate Laravel tests, Jigsaw, Helpspot Vault, Fixing MySql Memory, Sparkwatch, and Taxes.

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by subscribing either through iTunes or their RSS feed.