On the Laravel News site they've posted a quick tutorial showing how to add in "maintenance mode" management functionality into Laravel Nova, the recently released administration panel product for Laravel-based applications.

If for some reason you’ve been on another planet (see what I did there?), Laravel Nova is Now Available and the community has been rather busy building open-source tools around Nova.

One of those open-source tools is by David Piesse, who created a Laravel Nova extension that allows you to manage the maintenance mode of your application from Nova

The package to add the functionality is easily installed via Composer and integrate via a service provider. This then adds a new toggle to the administration panel's UI to enable or disable maintenance mode (as well as an icon showing the current status).

On the CoderWall site they've posted a tutorial that's a sort of reaction to the recent Laravel Nova administration dashboard release. In it they point out another project, the Laravel Admin Panel (LAP) that handles a lot of the same kind of functionality.

I have been working on this product on opensource for about 8 months now, and the project has become quite successful. People are actually using it and we are making our goal to make it more developer friendly. [...] According to my experience with people who have used our admin panel and its feature to create a module instantly, they are aloof of the details beneath that architecture and are constantly in need of help if anything goes wrong.

If new developers are made to use some super smart software which just creates everything for them, they are just not very aware of the happenings and end up not knowing anything of how the project works.

The post introduces the project and what kind of functionality it provides including:

• user/role/permissions management
• "page" management
• menu management

...and their "star of the show", the Module Boilerplate Generator that allows for the quick and easy generation of all code required to add a new module to the application (models, controllers, request handling, views, migrations, etc). You can find more information on the GitHub repository for the project.

As is mentioned in this new post from the Laravel News site, the latest product in the Laravel ecosystem - Laravel Nova - is now available for purchase.

We expected a Nova release at Laracon EU 2018 around the same time that Laravel 5.7 is due out. In an unexpected move (and in light of many people wanting to get their hands on Nova early) Taylor decided to ship Nova.

[...] Laravel Nova works with both Laravel 5.6 and the upcoming release of Laravel 5.7, so rest assured that it works with the latest stable version.

So what's Nova? It describes itself as "a beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel. Carefully crafted by the creators of Laravel to make you the most productive developer in the galaxy." It provides most of the functionality you'd expect from an administration panel including user management, model (resource) details, metrics and the ability to extend via custom functionality. The per-site pricing is relatively affordable and has two levels: Solo for $99 and Pro for $199.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest in their "It's the Booze Talking" series. In these shows host Cal Evans is joined by several members of the PHP community to discuss certain topics. In this latest show they talk about frameworks.

Cal is joined by representatives for several popular PHP frameworks including Ryan Weaver (Symfony), Clark Everetts (Zend), Joe Ferguson (Laravel) and Rob Allen (Zend Framework, Slim). Other panel members include Cathy Evans, Kara Ferguson and Chris Tankersley. They talk about their own experience with frameworks in the PHP community, Composer, PHP the Right Way and several other topics.

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

The php[architect] group has officially announced the five keynote speakers they'll be having at this year's php[world] conference conference.

We are excited to announce today the amazing keynote speakers that we have lined up for our php[world] conference this November. We’ve worked hard to find the best speakers and talks that cover the breadth of the PHP experience. We want php[world] to be a conference that pulls together all the different fragmented communities of PHP into one place to share ideas, and our keynotes reflect that mission.

The keynote speakers for this year come from a wide range of communities:

• Luke Stokes: "Turning Your Code Into a Company: The Parts They Don’t Tell You."
• Angela Byron: "Drupal 8: A Story of Growing Up and Getting Off the Island"
• Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire: "Idealism as code: From philosophy to empowerment"
• Andrew Nacin: "Trust, Community, and Automatic Updates"

The final "keynote" is actually a panel of seven developers representing some of the major projects in the PHP ecosystem: WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Joomla!, Symfony, Laravel, and Zend Framework. You can find out more about these keynotes here or just check out the conference on the main conference site.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has release their latest episode today in their "It's the Booze Talking" series. This latest episode, "APIs Part 1" (epside 6) includes a panel of guests including Keith Casey, Larry Garfield, Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Luke Stokes.

This episode was recorded live at this year's Sunshine PHP conference that just wrapped up in Miami, Florida. Note: this episode does have an "explicit" tag attached for some of the language during the conversation, so be warned.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. To get more great community interviews and panels, be sure you subscribe to their feed to get the latest.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has release their latest episode - the second part of their "It's the Booze Talking" #5 as recorded for at ZendCon 2013.

This episode features host Cal Evans and guests Adam Culp, Michelangelo van Dam, Davey Shafik, Eli White and Chris Tankersly.

You can listen to this episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you like what you hear, you should subscribe to their feed.

On the PHPMagazin.de site today, they've posted the video from this year's International PHP Conference of the panel discussion of "the cloud" and what's in it for businesses (note: original page is in German).

Who really needs the cloud? [...] Speaker Rainer Stropek (software architect at gmbh), Frank Muller (Canonical) and Glen Campbell (Rackspace) spoke on a keynote panel in Munich at the 2013 IPC about the cloud and its opportunities for business cases. It was less about basics, how to get the concepts of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, or propaganda, like the eternal question of the data (un) reliability of the cloud, but much more about a sense of which business scenarios cloud are ready.

You can watch the full keynote video either through the in-page player or over on YouTube as well as several other interviews and videos from this year's IPC (2013).

On the NetTuts.com site today they've posted the transcript of a panel discussion they had with several developers about exceptions and whether or not they should be used for flow control.

I’m pleased to release our first ever round table, where we place a group of developers in a locked room (not really), and ask them to debate one another on a single topic. In this first entry, we discuss exceptions and flow control.

The opinions vary among the group as to what exceptions should be used for (even outside of the flow control topic). Opinions shared are things like:

• Exceptions are situations in your code that you should never reach
• Errors cause Failures and are propagated, via Exceptions.
• So, essentially, exceptions are an “abstraction” purely to model the abnormality.
• Personally, I envision exceptions more as “objections.”
• Exceptions like this should be caught at some point and transformed into a friendly message to the user.

There's lots more than this in the full discussion so head over and read it all - there's definitely some good points made.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has released their second episode in the "It's the Booze Talking" series as recorded at this year's php|tek conference in May. In this new episode several community members talk about user groups (some as organizers, some as members).

Community members joining Cal on the podcast are:

• Ryan Weaver
• Jason Austin
• Jake Smith
• Michelangelo van Dam
• Adam Culp

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other great episodes.