On the Laravel News site there's a tutorial posted showing you how to use Blade's View::first functionality to dynamically show a template if it exists.

When building dynamic components or pages sometimes we want to display a custom template if it exists or otherwise fall back on a default one.

[...] We can solve this problem with a series of conditionals or by using view()->exists() to check if a custom template exists or not, however, Laravel 5.5 brings us a better and more elegant way.

A screencast of the functionality in action is included as well as a text-only version with code samples showing the previously used "if view exists" check and the refactor to use View::first instead.

This dynamic view loading feature was added to Blade in Laravel v5.5 and is a great way of keeping your controllers simple by avoiding extra conditionals when dealing with dynamic templates.

In a new post to his site Freek Van der Herten covers how some of the changes that happened in Laravel's v5.5 release would impact the packages Spatie shares, some of the more popular PHP packages with a wide range of functionality.

At Spatie we’ve released a auto-discovery facades functionality, LTS releases and how some new functionality replaces (retires) packages Spatie had already released.

Laravel 5.5 is probably the best release yet. But, in all honesty, I think that of every Laravel release. My recommendation is to get your apps upgraded to this version as soon as possible. The reward is that you can make use of all L5.5’s new features and the latest major versions of our packages.

According to this quick post on the Laravel News site the next version of the framework that will get long term support (LTS) will be version 5.5:

Version 5.1 was Laravel’s first LTS release and its two-year window of bug fixes are coming to an end this year. There have been a few people questioning if another LTS would be released and version 5.5 would be the next in line if it did happen.

Just today Laravel announced on Twitter that Laravel 5.5 will, in fact, continue the LTS line. [...] Just as the previous LTS this will include two years of bug fixes and three years of security updates.

Long term support means that the version will be "feature locked" on release but will continue to get bugfixes for issues found until the end of the maintenance window is reached.