The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a guide to help you upgrade from a Laravel 4 based application to the latest version, Laravel 5. Author Younes Rafie walks you through each step of the process, providing sample code and explanations of the changes along the way.

Laravel 5 is already out, but the fear of change is taking everyone. We keep hearing people complaining about some radical changes. Like, why this new folder structure? Will my application break if I do a composer update? In this article, we’re going to look at how to migrate your existing Laravel 4 application to Laravel 5 and understand the new folder structure.

he starts by helping you get Larave 5 installed and working via Composer. He then makes updates to some configuration files for his sample application (it hooks into the Google Analytics API) including the Analytics connection information. He includes changes to the route handling and moving some files around to their new locations. He also mentions the re-installation of the Illuminate/Html package as it's no longer included in the base release.

Alan Storm has a new post to his site that takes an in-depth look at Laravel's autoloader and how things have changed with the release of Laravel 5.

Last time we finished up our look at Laravel 4.2’s autoloader implementation. Like a lot of features in Laravel, (or any framework), once you pull out the microscope sharp edges begin to jut out everywhere. However, unlike many other framework teams, the Laravel core team is willing to make shifts in their platform and application architecture. If you’re familiar with the internals of Laravel 4, looking at the internals of Laravel 3 may be a little disorienting. Similarly, the recent release of Laravel 5 presents some new wrinkles at the system level.

In the post he compares some of the differences based off of things found in a previous look at Laravel 4.2's autoloading system. He lists out the autoloaders initialized during the autoloader phase, four of them, including the use of the PhpParser library and Composer-only autoloading. He also includes a section at the end about some other smaller autoloading changes in the Composer configuration in both the "autoload" and "autoload-dev" sections.

Matt Stauffer has posted a guide to his site to help you migrate from Laravel 4 to Laravel 5 as painlessly as possible. This is part fourteen in his overall introduction to Laravel 5 series of posts.

It's very simple to get started in a new Laravel 5 app [...] but what if you have a Laravel 4 app you want to upgrade? You might think the answer is to upgrade the Composer dependencies and then manually make the changes. Quite a few folks have created walkthroughs for that process, and it's possible—but there are a lot of little pieces you need to catch, and Taylor has said publicly that he thinks the better process is actually to start from scratch and copy your code in. So, that's what we're going to be doing.

He walks you through cloning a new Laravel 5 instance and setting up the various pieces of the application including the app itself, the domain folder and Composer dependencies. He then gets into the migration of things in the "app/" folder like controllers, database migrations and models. He also includes steps to update namespacing, handling the configuration updates, moving over user handling and any forms you may have created.

On Medium.com there's a recent post reviewing the book "Getting Started with Laravel 4". In the review Christopher Pitt briefly covers both the good and bad parts of the book.

This book is aimed at newcomers to PHP development, and to Laravel 4 in particular. It doesn’t disappoint. It starts slow, talking about the need for, and role filled by frameworks. It explains what Composer does, and why it’s useful for frameworks like Laravel. It’s not the typical “Laravel needs Composer, here’s the code you use” stuff. There are 40 pages of what is essentially a very gentle introduction, before you even start writing code.

He talks about the sample application the book walks you through creating and some other topics around it including unit testing and artisan commands. He mentions the more popular Code Bright book and points out that he believes it (Code Bright) to be a better deal for the money if you're looking for the more comprehensive intro to Laravel.

In this new post to his site Antonin Januska shares some of the "cool stuff" he learned about Laravel 4 while he was working on a project using this recently released version.

I started using Laravel 4 for testing, hobby projects, and actual work (ha!) a couple of months back and was genuinely excited about the upgrades as well as features I wasn’t aware of from previous versions as well. So here goes...

On his list are things like: Composer and its easy-to-implement autoloading structure, overriding default fields, using "remember" to cache data from queries and database seeding. There's a few others in the list, each with some example code (though sometimes just one line) that shows it in action. If you'd like to find out more about the Laravel framework, check out the project's main site.

7PHP.com has a new post that shares some of the feedback - from both the speaker and other attendees - of the latest Nomad PHP meeting featuring Phil Sturgeon talking on Laravel 4.

Previously on thursday 27th July 2013 (8pm CDT), NomadPHP hosted their 2nd talk which was about “Laravel 4” – the speaker being Phil Sturgeon. I also announced my 2nd free ticket giveaway for this online event – a generosity awesomely made possible by the ever-awesome @NomadPHP organizer; Cal Evans. In this short (as compared to the previous one) article, the spotlight will be on the speaker and an attendee. I’m thankful to both for their responses and sharing their NomadPHP experience with us. We’ll also have a quick (as in very quick) glance at the ticket winners.

The article starts with some of the feedback from Phil and his observations from the speaker side of things. This is followed by the attendee perspective from Don Gilbert, a maintainer of the Joomla framework. They talk about the goods and bads of the presentation and things they think the virtual user group could improve on in the future.

Since Google recently announced that they'd be supporting PHP on their App Engine service, developers have been trying out various setups to see how well they'd work. In this recent post Gilles Mergoil shares some of his experience with getting a Laravel 4-based application up and running in App Engine.

Now that Google App Engine opens to the PHP world and that the 4th version of the Laravel framework is officialy launched, we wanted to test these two promising technologies together at Neoxia. This blog post is the result of our tests whose goal was to have a standard Laravel 4 application on the Google App Engine PHP runtime up and running Given that an application without a database is not very useful, we also tested the Google Cloud SQL service which is the Google flavour of the MySQL database in the cloud.

He works through some of the steps for his first attempt at getting it set up, but notes that the seemingly working setup wasn't actually cooperating like it should. Thanks to some log analysis (and debugging) he found a few issues - missing functions, the lack of the mcrypt extension and session/cache/logging problems. He shows how to correct each of these and then moves on to connecting the app to a Google Cloud SQL database.

Sameer Borate has a new post today showing how you can do simple user authentication in a Laravel 4-based application using the built-in Auth functionality.

With the recent release of Laravel 4, PHP developers have at their disposal one of the finest frameworks for application development. As with all new frameworks, it is always good to write some quick code to get a feel for the underlying architecture. The following post shows a simple authentication application using Laravel.

He walks you through the creation of the simple "users" table, the configuration the Auth class will need to connect and authenticate and the form for the login. He also shows the steps for the actual authentication process as well as the code for the routes to make it all work. Additionally, he shows how to restrict pages to only those with the "admin" level access via an auth filter. You can download the example code here.

For those out there that don 't have a local PHP user group, you should check out the Nomad PHP virtual user group. It meets once a month online and this month's topic is an introduction to Laravel 4 (from Phil Sturgeon). It'll be happening at 8pm CDT on the 27th.

An introduction into Laravel 4, the Yet Another Framework that does things a little differently. See how it leverages Symfony components for its core along with multiple other Composer components instead of building everything from scratch. Learn how despite the complex Symfony underbelly Laravel 4 still gives a slick API to ease the learning curve of the framework to more of an accessibility ramp. After this run through of Laravel 4 you'll be psyched to trial it out, no matter what your usual "go to framework" is.

If you'd like to attend, tickets for the meetin g(to help cover the costs of the virtual meeting tools) will only run you $10 USD. If you're interested, check out this month's meeting page for more details.

The long-awaited version 4 of the Laravel Framework has finally been released (and the site has gotten a facelift as well):

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Laravel attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

Laravel aims to make the development process a pleasing one for the developer without sacrificing application functionality. Happy developers make the best code.

You can find lots of information about the framework and its functionality on the main project site including a forums area with lots of discussion around not only v4 but still v3 for those using it. You can also find some good discussion about the release itself in this thread over on Reddit.