The Laravel News Podcast, hosted by Jacob Bennett and Michael Dyrynda, has posted their latest episode: Episode #57 - Laravel 5.6, Spark 6.0, and framework helpers

Join us for a whirlwind journey through the latest Laravel Framework and Spark releases, as well as community project Larastream, and more.

The episode also includes mentions of this article covering five useful Laravel helpers and the model caching package. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading it directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get updates on when new shows are released.

Freek Van der Herten has posted a guide to sending an email in a Larvel Spark-based system to remind a user that their trial of a service is expiring soon. In this case, it's a monitoring service he offers called Oh Deal.

I'm currently building a webapp named Laravel Spark, a Laravel based template to kick off SaaS projects. It offers logic for organising users into teams, handles trial periods, subscriptions, payments, invoices and much more.

[...] Unfortunately, Spark will not send out a mail to team owners whose teams are in trial periods that will soon expire. Luckily it's easy to add that yourself. I'll show you how to do just that in this post. Along the way, you'll learn some good general tips for sending out emails in batches. Let's get started!

He then starts in on the code, showing first how to locate the teams that should be sent the email. He adds a new field to track when the email was sent and the code required to send the actual email. He shows how to make the command restartable, create the "Mailable" class and the command to send the actual email.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted an article for the Laravel Spark users out there, sharing their top nine tips for getting the most out of the popular "boilerplate" tool.

A while ago, I wrote about a product I wanted to build, to allow easy remote backups for Pagekit sites. I’ve been working on it (periodically) since then, and have come across a few interesting bits of advice.

I decided to use Laravel Spark as the foundation for the product, and I thought it would be helpful to share the advice. Whether you’re just starting your Spark app, or are in maintenance mode, I think you’ll find some of these tips useful!

His tips cover a wide range of the product's features:

• You Don’t Have to Keep All the Base Files
• Use Simple Repositories
• Don’t use caret (^) Laravel dependencies
• Host on Forge
• Re-Arrange Middleware

Each of these comes with a description and, where appropriate, a bit of code to help clarify the point.

If you’re on the fence about trying Spark, I can recommend it. It’s given my product a head-start it wouldn’t have had otherwise. Hopefully these tips will save you even more time.

On the Laravel News site there's an announcement posted about the latest release of Laravel Spark (v2). Spark is a commercial package from the creator(s) of Laravel that provides simpler billing for subscription-based services.

Laravel Spark, the commercial Laravel package that provides instant scaffolding for subscription billing, has just released v2.

The 2.0 release is a free upgrade for all license holders and it adds compatibility with Laravel 5.3 as well as deprecating the Spark installer in favor of using Composer directly.

This also adds dependency updates so it is compatible with both Echo and Passport that are new packages in Laravel 5.3.

There's an upgrade guide for those that are needing to bring their install up to the latest release. If you're more interested in what Spark has to offer, check out the main page for the product. A single-site license costs $99 USD and includes a wide range of features and technologies to make managing your subscription-based service simpler.

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.

In the latest episode of the Voices of the ElePHPant podcast host Cal Evans talks with Taylor Otwell, creator of the Laravel framework about Spark, the Laravel-based package that provides many of the basic features needed to run the business around your application.

Cal and Taylor start off talking about why Taylor wanted to create Spark and where the need came from in his own development work. He wanted to share the results and make it faster for people to work on the application and not these features around it. They also talk about some of the features that are included in Spark and why they exist. There's also a discussion about why he chose to go with Vue.js for the frontend of the application, the user impersonation feature and

This is a live video interview that Cal did with Taylor you can watch either through the in-page audio player or directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the interview be sure to follow their feed and keep up with them on Twitter.

A highly anticipated project in the Laravel community - Laravel Spark - has officially launched its site providing more information about the product and its upcoming release. Laravel News gives its own brief summary of Spark in a new post:

Spark is a complete scaffolding for building a SaaS app including authentication, password reset, billing plans, payment method updates, invoices, coupons, user impersonation, and more with support for Stripe and Braintree.

The official release date is April 19th, next Tuesday, and although no pricing is on the site the rumor is it’ll be less than $100. This will save you many hours from building it all yourself.

For those interested in finding out a bit more in-depth about the product, check out this recently released screencast over on the Laracasts site where Taylor Otwell shows the basic setup and features of the platform.

The Laravel News podcast has posted their latest episode today: Episode #11 - "Spark Watch, Interview with Shawn McCool".

In this episode, we talk with Shawn McCool about Laracon.eu and latest Spark news, my new dotdev.co project, and painless switching to mariadb.

They also spend some time discussing one of the latest major advancements in the world of Composer - its official tagging of beta 1. You can listen to this latest episode either by subscribing via iTunes or their RSS feed.

In a previous post to the Laravel News site, the latest offering in the Laravel ecosystem, Spark, was introduced. In this post Matt Stauffer takes a "deep dive" into its features and functionality, digging down into the code to see what makes it tick.

If you've been around on the general Laravel-interested Internet over the last month or two, or if you attended Laracon US or Laracon EU, you've probably already heard of Laravel Spark. If you haven't, check out Taylor's introductory video from Laracon EU.

I've held off on writing about it until now, because it has changed a lot over the span of its development. It's released as an Alpha now, so the API has solidified some... but it'll still change quite a bit between now and the release. [...] This is, instead, a deep-dive into how it works and what it does. I'll be writing a more general introduction to Spark once it's actually released, so beware: this is a bit of a deeper dive, for people geeky enough to want to look at an alpha release.

He starts with a recap and a high-level overview of the system, what it's designed to do and how to get it installed (either in a fresh install or an existing application). He then starts breaking down the pieces that make up the system:

• changes made to files in your current application
• details on the contents of the SparkServiceProvider
• the addition of an app.js defining the VueJs bootstrap for the interface

He then starts looking at the interface, showing how to register a new user (with two-factor auth), work with the "teams" functionality to group users and create payment and plan options for your products.

On the Laravel News site Eric Barnes has posted a guide to installing and configuring the alpha version of Spark, the latest offering from the Laravel ecosystem for building out a unified SaaS billing system.

The Alpha of Laravel Spark has just been released and it’s goal is to be an opinionated way of building out business oriented SaaS applications. It features team management, user roles, recurring billing through Stripe, and much more. In this tutorial let’s take a deeper look at this new package.

He gets right into the installation of the tool as a Composer package to pull in the spark installer command line tool. A quick spark install command is all it takes to create the new application. He then gets into the different things that you can do with the generated application including:

• Customize Registration and Profile Updates
• Customize Roles
• Customize Settings Tabs
• Building Spark Subscription Payment Plans
• Create Coupons and Discounts

This is just a preview of what's offered in the package and what's to come in the final product, but it gives you a good idea of where it starts.