Jason McCreary, creator of the Laravel Shift service that makes it easier to upgrade your Laravel code to new versions, has a new post to his site where he shares Laravel "by the numbers", some statistics based on the use of the service.

I had the privilege to speak at Laracon again this year. The last Laracon talk I gave, Practicing YAGNI, is one I am most proud of. Initially, I wanted to do a continuation on this topic. But there were some other talks on related topics. So I thought, “what can I talk about that’s unique to me”.

The answer was Laravel Shift. As the creator of Shift I have a unique insight into Laravel apps.

I’m super sensitive about sounding salesy. I don’t want to talk about Shift itself. I want to talk about the data derived from Shift.

The statistics are based on around 8500 Laravel applications currently using the service. He shares the results for:

• Most popular Laravel version
• Most popular packages
• Most changed file(s)
• Custom namespacing

Along with these basic numbers, he also shares information about project structures, inheritance injection, facade "abuse", queries in views (using models) and many others. Check out the full post for details on these and other results.

The Laravel News site has announced the release of the latest episode of the Laravel News podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda - Episode #32: Laravel Shift with Jason McCreary.

Jake and Michael speak with Jason McCreary about Laravel Shift, LTS software, and getting git.

Topics mentioned in this episode include:

• YAGNI with Laravel
• Laravel 5.5 will be LTS
• Laracon Online conference swag
• Stripe Elements
• Cloudflare HTTPS leaks

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow Laravel News on Twitter for updates when new shows are released.

In this new post to his site Joe Ferguson takes a look at Laravel Shift, an automated service that makes it easier to upgrade your Laravel-based application quickly.

I’ve had an eye on LaravelShift.com since it first made it’s way across my twitter feed some time ago. I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting and talking with it’s creator Jason McCreary at a few conferences over the past year. I think it’s really awesome when community members are able to take a product to market that not only scratches their own itch, but can provide value to the rest of the community as well.

[...] I built NerdsAreDrinking on Laravel 5.1 because that was the current version at the time. We have seen two more release since: 5.2 and 5.3. The upgrade process isn’t terrible however there is a lot you may need to take into account. Rather than upgrade from 5.1 to 5.2 and then 5.2 to 5.3 I decided to use Laravel Shift to do the 5.1 to 5.2 upgrade for me.

Joe then talks some about his experience using the service and was impressed at the speed of the service to create the required Pull Request for the update. He includes a link to the PR so you can see what the upgrade looks like too. He feels like the money spent (around $11 USD) was well invested and would definitely use the service again.