On the Laravel News site there's a post announcing a course from the Laracasts.com site (a video tutorial site targeted towards Laravel) covering the use of Laravel Forge, the community's server management and deployment platform.

Learn Laravel Forge is new video course on Laracasts teaching you all things Forge, by guest instructor Marcel Pociot! The course consists of over twenty free videos walking you through configuring servers with Laravel Forge.

Topics covered in the 20+ videos include:

• creating a first Forge project
• provisioning a load balancer
• customizing PHP settings
• configuring firewalls
• using Forge recepies
• setting up SSL
• using the Forge API

Each of the videos runs anywhere from 3 minutes to about 9 minutes so they're definitely "bite sized" and easy to consume when you have a few extra minutes.

On the Laravel Daily site they've posted an interview with Bobby Bouwmann, one of the most active (and awarded) members of the Laracasts website. Laracasts is an online learning site for instruction on the use of the Laravel framework and related technologies.

In recent years, Laracasts has become a no.1 resource for learning Laravel. Also, there’s a really active discussion forum on the website, so we decided to chat with one of the most active members there. Bobby Bouwmann has almost 1000 “Best Reply” awards on the forum, which is a huge number. So what is it like to be so active on Laracasts? Let’s find out.

In the interview Bobby answers questions about:

• what drives him to participate in the forum
• what value he finds in Laracasts
• how he handles "developers" that don't bother looking for answers in documentation
• what he does when he sees the same question asked over and over

His final answer offers some advice to Jeffrey Way about the forum itself, making a suggestion of how to improve it by "keeping the forum clean".

A highly anticipated project in the Laravel community - Laravel Spark - has officially launched its site providing more information about the product and its upcoming release. Laravel News gives its own brief summary of Spark in a new post:

Spark is a complete scaffolding for building a SaaS app including authentication, password reset, billing plans, payment method updates, invoices, coupons, user impersonation, and more with support for Stripe and Braintree.

The official release date is April 19th, next Tuesday, and although no pricing is on the site the rumor is it’ll be less than $100. This will save you many hours from building it all yourself.

For those interested in finding out a bit more in-depth about the product, check out this recently released screencast over on the Laracasts site where Taylor Otwell shows the basic setup and features of the platform.

The Laracasts Snippet podcast has posted their latest episode with a brief look at Russian-doll caching in Laravel.

One of the things I've been tinkering with these last few days is a mechanism for performing Russian-Doll caching in Laravel. In addition to determining if I can even make it work, I've been pondering whether this truly has a place in your future projects, or if there simply isn't enough value to warrant its usage. Who knows - let's talk about it.

The podcast also links to this series of posts on the Laracasts site on the subject. If you'd like to listen to this podcast, though, you can use either the in-page audio player or you can download the mp3 of the show. If you enjoy it, be sure to subscribe to their feed too.

The Laravel News site has posted a video from a recent Laravel Sydney meeting featuring Jeffrey Way, owner and operator of the popular Laracasts screencast tutorial service.

The Laravel Sydney user group had a special guest in their latest meeting. At 5:30am, his time, Jeffrey Way complete with blood-shot eyes and a massive coffee jar did a live question and answer interview with the group led by Ben Corlett.

You can watch the video either through the in-page player or by heading over to YouTube to watch it there directly.

On the latest episode of the Full Stack Radio podcast host Adam Wathan sits down with Jeffrey Way of the Laracasts website for an interview.

In this episode, Adam talks with Jeffrey Way of Laracasts about learning, object oriented design, testing, API usability, and whole bunch of other stuff.

You can listen to this interview either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get the latest episodes as they're released.

The Laracasts site has launched a new video series with some advanced tips on using Eloquent, the ORM layer from the Laravel framework.

Sure, you've learned the essentials of using Eloquent in your applications, but do you really understand what's going on under the hood? Well, that's specifically what we're interested in for this series. How do all the bits and pieces fit together?

There's two videos posted so far helping you build a basic application to work inside of and looking behind the scenes of "find" to see what happens when it's executed. Only the first video in the series is free, but it gives you an idea of what will be covered and the style of the videos.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has released their latest episode today - Episode #19 with special guest Jeffrey Way of the Laravel community.

Well known PHP/Laravel nice-guy Jeffrey Way from NetTuts and Laracasts joins regular guest Zack Kitzmiller to discuss the wonderful world of Laravel once again. This time the discussion focuses on some of the silly complaints people have with an otherwise wonderful system, and on the reusability of its packages.

You can catch this latest episode a few different ways: either listening to the audio through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the live video of the recording.

A new resource has popped up for those wanting to get even more information about the Laravel PHP framework - the Laracasts.com site. The site is devoted to providing a consolidated listing of Laravel screencasts across the web.

[This site is a] compilation of screencasts from Youtube and Vimeo. Let's learn Laravel together!

There's already a good number of screencasts posted to the site from folks like Taylor Otwell (author of the framework), Jeffrey Way (NetTuts) as well as several recordings of talks from various conferences about the framework. If you have a screencast that's not linked on the site, you can submit the information for review and inclusion.