On the Cloudways blog there's a new post from author Saquib Rizwan that compares two of the most popular Laravel-based content management systems: OctoberCMS VS AsgardCMS.

Web developers and development agencies around the world love rapid application development. To keep up with the fast pace of development and fulfill client requirements within the deadline, developers often use a CMS. Popular CMS options available today include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. There are times when these established players are not up to the task. In such scenarios, developers often need a flexible and customizable CMS that are often created using the Laravel framework.

In this article, I will compare OctoberCMS and AsgardCMS, the top two Laravel powered CMS.

The article starts with a brief overview of each, describing some background and how their architected. It then lists some of the requirements for each, installation methods, GitHub "profile" and the basic features offered. It then gets into the comparison, sharing some of the pros and cons for each CMS. There's no "winner" in the article as it's just designed to compare.

The SitePoint PHP blog continues their series covering the use of the OctoberCMS product to create a custom content management system tailored to your needs. In this new part of the series they show how to build a custom plugin for team management, showing how to use models and controllers along the way.

So far, we covered different aspects of OctoberCMS. This is a follow up article to discover how to use OctoberCMS for CRUD applications and take a detailed view at how to work with models, relations and controllers. [...] We are going to build a project management plugin where you can add different users to teams and assign them to projects.

You'll need to follow the first part of the series if you want to be able to follow along. Once you have that set up they show how to use the artisan command to create the plugin scaffold code and what the resulting pluginDetails function should look like. The tutorial then shows you how to create the related database tables and how to add the "team" column to the current user table. They then get in to creating the models to work with the tables, building out the controllers and view to manage the teams and the same kinds of handling for the "projects" the teams are related to. The post ends with a look at creating lists of projects/teams, adding in filtering and working with permissions for the management of teams.

On the Kinsta blog Mark Gavalda has shared their latest PHP 7 versus HHVM benchmarks now that the first official stable release of PHP 7 has been unleashed for public consumption. They opted for testing with a large variety of tools and software rather than simple benchmarking scripts to give a more "real world" look at the difference between the two.

To see how much of an improvement we can expect from this new PHP interpreter we put the public release version of PHP 7.0 to test and compared a couple of popular software suites’ performance using PHP 5.6.16, PHP 7.0 and HHVM 3.10.1 on a bare metal server (so virtualization doesn’t interfere with the results). Tested software includes WordPress 4.3.1, Drupal 8, Magento 2.0 CE, OctoberCMS build 309, PyroCMS v3 beta2, and Flarum v0.1.0-beta.4.

The basic tl;dr of the post is that HHVM still performs better for all of the software tested but PHP 7 is not too far off on some of them. They share the specifications of the machine (bare metal) they used for testing and get into the results for each of the seven pieces of software tested. Their results are in transactions per second and both graphed and numeric results are shown. Unfortunately, though, the Flarum software had to be kept on a "pending" list as it doesn't run on either PHP 7 or HHVM properly.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post in their series covering the OctoberCMS today, this time looking at how to create a custom theme. They walk you through the creation of a simple "blogging" theme type with posts, categories and home/about pages.

October CMS is the new star in the sky of CMSes. Built on top of Laravel, it promises joyful coding and a back to basics approach. Read our introduction here and find out how to build plugins for it here. In this article, we’re going to see how we can build a theme.

Their theme makes use of the rainlab plugin allowing for the use of Markdown content in your posts. They start by adding in the directories and base files needed for the theme to the "themes" directory. With the plugin installed they start working through the configuration content and setup of the theme files including PHP and markup sections. He also shows how to use placeholders, partials and layouts in the content of the posts. Next is the static pages, About and Home, with a bit simpler configuration. The code is then included for the remainder of the pages: single posts, categories and the post listing.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent post taking a closer look at the OctoberCMS, a content management system based on the Laravel framework. In this new post they walk you through what the CMS is, the features it has to offer and help you understand (and add to) the different kinds of elements.

October CMS is a lightweight, back to basics content management system built on Laravel, and on a mission to make your web development workflow easy again. It boasts a very simple and fast learning curve, with a guarantee that you’ll be off the ground and up and running in no time at all. It’s scalable and extensible through the plugin system, is easily maintainable through its file-based system, and allows for the effortless creation of administrative back-end interfaces. Before we dig a bit deeper into this promising CMS, let’s look at the foundation a bit.

They walk you through the install (from their GitHub repository) to get a sample site up and running. The tutorial then goes through each of the basic sections, explaining what they are and providing example code where appropriate:

• Themes & Templates
• Pages
• Partials
• Layouts
• Content Blocks
• the AJAX Module

They also talk about extensibility via plugins and components and link to more information for those looking for more detail.