On the Laravel News site they've posted information about a series of videos on the Laracasts site covering what's new in Laravel 5.6.

Laravel 5.6 has been for a few weeks now and it includes a few nice new features like Broadcast Channel Classes, Collision Reporting, Improved Logging, and more.

In order to get you up to speed on all these new features, Laracasts has started a new free series, “What’s new in Laravel 5.6” that will go through each major feature of this release.

The series includes videos covering how they upgraded the Laracasts' codebase to 5.6, collision reporting, logging improvements and dynamic rate limiting. More videos will be added to the series as it goes along. You can check out the current listing of videos on the Laracasts site.

The Laracasts site has a new screencast posted showing you how to integrate Behat with Laravel for functional testing of your application. Behat is an automated testing tool, written in PHP, that's made for frontend functional tests rather than backend, unit tests

It has always been a little tricky to hook Behat into Laravel. But, luckily, that's no longer the case. In this lesson, from scratch, we'll install both Laravel 5 and Behat 3, and then learn about using a special extension to make working with the two that much easier. In a follow-up lesson, we'll move on to discussing general BDD, and best practices for constructing your feature files.

You can watch the screencast on the Laracasts site and you can find out more about Behat from its documentation.