On the DeliciousBrains.com site they've posted the latest installment for their "Hosting WordPress Yourself" series (part 12) showing how to move your WordPress installation over to a new server.

In part 11 of Hosting WordPress Yourself I demonstrated how to update a server’s packages (including PHP). However, I didn’t show how to upgrade the server itself, because it’s not something I recommend.

[...] In this article, I’m going to walk you through the steps required to migrate an existing WordPress site to a new server. These are the same steps that I took just a few months ago to migrate the Delicious Brains site to a new server with little to no downtime.

The rest of the article is broken up into several different sections, each with descriptions and commands/code you'll need:

• Securely Copying Files
• File Migration
• Nginx Configuration
• HTTPS Certificates
• Spoof DNS
• Database Import

They also include hints on migrating with minimum downtime and things to look out for when you "flip the switch".

Matt Stauffer has continued his series looking at Laravel 5.1 with a new post covering the ACL functionality recently added in 5.1.1. This functionality adds on to the pre-existing authentication handling that has been a part of the framework for a while.

The authentication that Laravel provides out-of-the-box makes it simple to get user signup, login, logout, and password resets up and running quickly and easily.

But if you needed to control access to certain sections of the site, or turn on or off particular pieces of a page for non-admins, or ensure someone can only edit their own contacts, you needed to bring in a tool like BeatSwitch Lock or hand-roll the functionality, which would be something called ACL: Access Control Lists, or basically the ability to define someone's ability to do and see certain things based on attributes of their user record. Thankfully, Taylor and Adam Wathan wrote an ACL layer in Laravel 5.1.11 that provides this functionality without any added work.

He talks about the main interface to the ACL system, the Gate class/facade, and gives a simple example of it in use. He then gets into how it works in defining abilities and checking access levels with both the facade and on the model level. He also shows how to use the checks in Blade templates and how to intercept the evaluations for custom evaluation. He ends the post talking about the concept of policies and controller authorization to allow for additional checking.