On the Laravel News site there's a recent post covering something that was announced at the Laracon US 2017 conference: the Laravel Certification Program.

A licensed Laravel certification platform was announced at Laracon EU this week, and a new landing page is up at The post also lists out some of the topics included in the certification test including framework basics, Blade templating, service use and localization. There's also sections asking about Laravel best practices and more general PHP topics. You can find out more information about the certification and get some answers to questions in their FAQ.

If you weren't able to make it to this year's Laracon US conference, the Nexmo blog has shared a summary of the event including some of their own highlights.

I recently attended Laracon in New York City for the 4th year in a row. This year the conference was held at New World Stages in Hell’s Kitchen, with 500 people in attendance (and a waiting list of over 1000!) making it the biggest one yet.

While the conference focuses on the Laravel PHP framework, the talks were diverse and covered topics like database segregation for multi-tenant applications, aesthetic and design tips for developers, advice on growing and scaling a side project into a business, and the importance of deep-focus work.

The author focuses on four of the talks that she found most useful:

• "CRUDDY by Design" from Adam Wathan
• "Custom Laravel" by Matt Stauffer
• "Slay the Beast" from Jeffrey Way

The final talk was actually a keynote from Taylor Otwell himself covering the major changes that are coming in the 5.5 version of the framework including the Laravel Horizon queue management package. Each section comes with details of the session and links to other sources for more information.

Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site sharing some of the new features and updates to Laravel that were announced at Laracon US 2017. This is the second post in his series covering what's new in Laravel 5.5.

He was updating the post as the items were announced (live-blogging) and now the post has the complete list:

• Frontend presets
• New routing options
• Blade::if
• Renderable mailable
• Renderable Exceptions
• Responsable interface
• One-off Notifications
• Validation improvements
• TrustedProxy package brought internally
• Migrate:fresh
• New database migration trait
• WithoutExceptionHandling middleware
• Dusk improvements
• Package auto-discovery
• Vendor:publish menu
• Auto-registered console commands
• Job chaining
• Better missing model handling in jobs

As you can see the list is quite long and filled with both updates to current functionality and with new features. Check out the full post for information on each - some come with descriptions and other with commands/code to show them in action.

On the Laravel News site, they've posted an announcement about tickets for the Laracon 2017 US conference (happening in New York City next month) for livestream only.

Laracon US is once again offering tickets to the live stream plus early access to the recorded videos for $29.99.

Please note that the live stream feed connection information will be distributed the day of the conference. This ticket also includes early access to full video archives. Refunds are generally not distributed in the event of connection problems since early access to video archives is provided.

Speaker at this year's event include:

• Freek Van der Herten
• Matt Stauffer
• Nils Adermann
• Laura Elizabeth

They will also be joined by Jeffrey Way, Adam Wathan and the creator of Laravel itself Taylor Otwell.

As is mentioned in this post to the Laravel News site, the official announcement has been made about the location and date for the Laracon 2017 conference - July 25th & 26th in New York City, NY.

Laracon 2017 has just launched its new site for the 2017 event and it will be held in NYC on July 25th and 26th. Both days will have talks starting at 9:00 AM and dinner and mingling after each day.

The venue is New World Stages which features a contemporary design and positioned between Times Square and Hell’s Kitchen.

The 2017 event will feature the "Laracon Science Fair", after parties and a wide range of speakers on both Laravel and non-Laravel related topics. Tickets aren't on sale yet but you can find out more about the conference and, if you're interested in potentially speaking at the event, submit your session ideas for consideration.