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.

On the Laravel News site they've posted an announcement about the release of Laravel Nova, an administration dashboard created and maintained by Taylor Otwell and the Laravel project maintainers.

We’re thrilled to announce Laravel Nova, a “beautifully designed administration panel for Laravel” created by the Laravel team.

The level of customization available in Nova is mind-blowing, and it’s quite intelligent out-of-the-box once you configure Nova resources for your application.

The frontend is powered by Vue.js with the backend hooking into your current Laravel application (with a bit of extra functionality added). Information and functionality provided by Nova includes resource management tools, searching via SQL queries, custom action definition and metrics. You can find out more information about its features on the project site and sign up for the mailing list for more information when it launches in August 2018. Nova will cost $99 USD for a solo license and $!99 USD for a "site" license (business).

That Podcast, hosted by PHP community members Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall, has posted it's latest episode - Episode #44: The One Where We Manage Products. They're joined by special guest Christophe Dujarric.

Christophe Dujarric shares his experience with Product Management

Other topics mentioned include a tweet about Bitcoin refunds, sketch collaboration tools, Laravel Shift and the article "Product Design is not Product Management". You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. Be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when the latest shows are released.

The Loosely Coupled podcast, with hosts and PHP community members Jeff Carouth and Matt Frost, has posted their latest episode today - episode #24: Minimum Viable Product.

In this episode Jeff and Matt talk about the concept of a minimum viable product and what it means to us as developers. The concept of an MVP is simple but it often gets used as an excuse to put out poorly-implemented products. Listen as Jeff and Matt discuss their opinions about the problems with MVP in our industry and how we as developers can fight against them.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed to get this and other episodes as they're released.

On the Magenticians site there's a new post that provides an update of sorts, a post-mortem really, about their opinion of the "open source-ness" of the Magento product and project.

Little less than four months ago, we published an opinion-piece regarding Magento 2 and why we thought it wasn’t really holding up to the mindset of being an open source project. In four months, a lot has changed. [...] Magento 2 was (and still is) being marketed as a new platform which not only refreshes the entire code base, but also improves handling of the community its feedback and involvement. [...] Most of the original critique was therefore that, though by definition Magento 2 is an open source project, all the rest which should naturally come with “being open source”, severely lacked. It is one of our best read articles and linked from a dozen of websites; a timely status update is in its place.

They go on to update some of their original comments and note that things "feel more like open source" with changes including direct pushes to GitHub (not mirrored) and better external communication. They point out a few other smaller things including their developer hub, updated developer documentation and more informative blog posts about the project/project.

The SitePoint blog has posted the next part of their "using the eBay trading API" series today (part three) showing you how to add products to your store via their API.

In this third and final part of our eBay Trading API series, we’ll be building the product adding functionality into our application. Now that we’re done with the store settings, we can begin with writing the code for the controller that would handle the creation of products.

He walks you through the code to create the "new" action on your Slim controller, build the view to gather the product information and handle the upload of product images with the Dropzone Javascript library. Also included is the code to get the current category list (to populate a dropdown list) and the code needed to create the product, both in your database and sending it back to the eBay API for insertion. This finishes the series about using this API, but you can get more information on the API itself though its documentation. The full code for the tutorial series is available on GitHub.

The SitePoint PHP blog they've posted the first part of a new series about using the eBay API as a part of a product management application. In part one they start by getting things set up on the eBay trading API and creating the database you'll need for the rest of the series.

In this tutorial series, I’ll walk you through Ebay’s Trading API. The Trading API allows you to build applications that can be used for selling in Ebay. Here are some examples of things you can do with the API: retrieve store information, update store preferences, add products to a specific eBay store, end product listings, update product price and retrieve product information. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating an app that allows users to create a product on eBay through the use of the API.

They start by helping you register an application on the eBay developer site and configure the settings to match your needs. They link to some of the tools you can use during your development and some of the headers/content you'll need to set to make your requests. The tutorial wraps up with the SQL needed to create the database backend for your store's settings, products, listings and some sample data to insert.

On the Symfony blog today they've announced what they call the Symfony Marketplace, a resource to locate products and services, all related to Symfony.

Today we are thrilled to introduce the new and long-awaited Marketplace section on symfony.com website. The Symfony Marketplace is a directory of products and services related to Symfony and its ecosystem. [...] We envisioned this marketplace for the first time when we launched Symfony 2.0. Thanks to the recent boom of Symfony related services and applications, the marketplace is now a reality.

Currently they have around 45 projects (open source and commercial) and tools that are popular in the Symfony community. There's also links to several Symfony-friendly services out there including Microsoft Azure and Platform.sh. Sound interesting? Be sure to check it out or find out how to get your projects/product/service added to the lists.

As some developers move on in their careers, they start to progress more towards a management role. Sometimes this comes in the form of a "product manager" since most of their knowledge is wrapped around the product(s) they've been working on. However, making the move up from developer to product manager can be a difficult transition. In this new post to the SitePoint Web blog, Ernest Sliter tries to help with his own three-stage advice.

It’s certainly not uncommon for developers or other employees serving in technical roles to eventually transition to product management. Some developers may find they enjoy managing the product road map and solving customers’ problems rather than writing code and building the product themselves. Other seasoned engineers may be searching for a suitable career transition into a management position. If you’re interested in moving to product management in the future, here are three critical steps to make the transition.

For each of his steps he provides a summary of what the choice or action entails and includes a few sub-points that can help:

• Decide Whether You’re Right for Product Management
• Expand Your Knowledge of Product Management
• Take Action!

Paul Jones has shared some of his thoughts about framework tradeoffs in his latest post. In it he compares two perspectives about framework use for beginners - either the "get something out there" product approach or focusing on the the long term maintenance of the product.

Phil Sturgeon at his blog, writing about product creators who neither know nor care much about programming as a discipline. [...] Phil’s post focuses on the joyful, proud moments of creation that lead to business success, whether in terms of venture funding or continued sales. In this essay, I want to focus on what happens after that, when that initial creation passes into other hands to be maintained.

Paul talks about how frameworks can allow developers to work "beyond their level" and be more productive than they could be otherwise. He points out that this can create a beginner-level codebase that works "just enough" and then is usually passed off to more experienced developers to update, change and flat out fix issues.

From a financial standpoint, and perhaps even from an economic standpoint, it’s easy to see enabling-via-framework as a positive. Indeed, the product creator may justify his failures of good programming practice by substituting the product popularity and continued rounds of funding as a marker of success. [...] But from a programming practices standpoint, enabling-by-framework too often leads to pain and frustration on the part of the maintenance programmers, who are now saddled with the baggage of an amateur.