On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a new tutorial from Christopher Pitt showing you how to "start a business" with Laravel Spark, the recently released scaffolding product that takes care of a lot of the typical "business" handling for online products.

I am really excited about Laravel Spark. By the time you read this, there will probably be a multitude of posts explaining how you can set it up. That’s not as interesting to me as the journey I’m about to take in creating an actual business with Spark!

The idea is simple. I have created a Pagekit module which you can use to back up and restore site data. The module makes it easy to store and download these backups, and restore them on different servers.

He starts off with some of the background behind the product and getting Spark set up with some additional functionality (like additional user fields and gathering billing information). He then creates the functionality allowing for the actual storing of the backups and API functionality that integrates with it. The post wraps up with his look at adding the code needed to download the backups and return them back to the user.

On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a post from Bruno Skvorc introducing the Pagekit CMS, a content management system that's "clean, extensible and fast" (but it does come with some caveats).

Pagekit hit version 1 recently, and as I’d been looking at personal blogging engines, I thought it’d only be fair to check it out. Granted, blogging is merely a subset of the functionality Pagekit can offer, but a good basic test-drive subset nonetheless.

He walks you through the installation and configuration of a new Pagekit-based site using their own installer script (after downloading it from their site). He then goes through some of the basic features of the CMS including native Markdown support, how the editor looks and how the results render. He includes a guide on setting up a blog too using a "blog" plugin and an extension to add in better syntax highlighting. He also looks at other features of the CMS including custom layouts and "pretty" URL support. He points out some security changes you'll want to make out of the box to protect sensitive files and briefly touches on deploying the site to production and links to their own guide for additional help.