On the Cloudways blog they've posted another in their series of interviews with members of the PHP community. In this latest article they talk with Taylor Otwell, the creator and lead developer of the Laravel framework.

Even today, PHP developers face the tough question of which framework to choose for their next project. The choice has largely been restricted to a handful of frameworks, out of which Laravel and Symfony stand out of the competition.

To clarify the situation, I reached out to Taylor Otwell, the creator of the Laravel framework to clarify some of the important points of the debate. This interview covers Otwell’s opinions on Laravel vs. Symfony debate and the competition between PHP and JavaScript.

In the interview Taylor answers questions about:

• selecting a framework (Symfony vs Laravel)
• the differences between the two frameworks and their usual audiences
• workflow automation with Laravel
• framework release cycles
• the communities around each framework

You can read Taylor's answers to these and other questions in the full interview.

In this post to his site Matt Stauffer poses an interesting question around one of the more popular PHP frameworks these days. He wonders "what would happen to Laravel if Taylor Otwell disappears?"

After we talked a bit about enterprise apps on the Laravel Podcast the other day , a few folks in the Laravel community have been talking about what makes a tool enterprise-ready. I have a lot of thoughts about support plans, SLAs, and other such features of "enterprise-readiness", but I'll save those for a later date. Today, let's talk about the easiest-to-dismiss concern: What happens if Taylor disappears suddenly?

This question brings up the point that, unlike a framework backed by a company, a framework backed by an individual relies on that individual's desire and ability to keep the project running. What happens if Taylor decides he wants to retire and be a goat farmer?

He shares the plan that's already been set in place with Jeffrey Way (of Laracasts) being the next in line to head up the project. He also mentions the Laravel, LLC company that wouldn't go away if Taylor did and how the community would fit in.

The PHP Roundtable podcast has released their latest episode - Episode #62: All Things Laravel. In this episode host Sammy Powers is joined by Adam Wathan, Jeffrey Way, Mohamed Said, Dries Vints and the creator of Laravel Taylor Otwell.

In the episode they "chat about all things Laravel" including:

• a quick overview of the mission and what to expect from the framework
• some of the functionality the framework includes
• the "refactoring to collections" content from Adam
• features that were inspired by other languages
• reflection-based dependency injection
• the idea of a forum as a "default application" for those new to the framework

You can catch this latest episode either using the in-page video player or directly over on YouTube. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when the latest shows are released.

On Medium.com Taylor Otwell, lead developer and creator of the Laravel framework, has posted some results about framework code complexity based on his own research and information gathering.

Last week as I was refactoring and cleaning Laravel for the 5.4 release, Graham Campbell showed me some code complexity statistics for the framework. I decided to compare this against some other PHP frameworks to see how Laravel stacks up.

[...] I was pleased to see Laravel has the lowest average method complexity of any of the frameworks measured. In addition, Laravel does not contain any method longer than 13 lines of code. [...] The primary goal of this comparison is to compare how I personally write code vs. how other projects are writing code. All project’s measured have a large enough sample size of pure, first-party code to accurately measure that.

He then shares the cyclomatic complexity numbers for several different (and popular) frameworks in the PHP ecosystem:

• Laravel
• Symfony
• Zend Framework
• Cake
• Slim

He also compares just the Eloquent ORM and the Doctrine ORM components. For each he provides stats like: lines of code, average method complexity and percentage of methods that are non-static. The results are interesting but most are pretty much expected (like the Slim microframework being lowest on several of the statistics mostly due to its size).

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode in their series of interviews with members of the PHP community. In this latest show host Cal Evans talks with Joe Fergeuson and Taylor Otwell to chat about all things Laravel.

Cal and Taylor talk about some of the origins of Laravel and why he created it. He goes through some of the early days of the framework and why he included the features that he did. They also talk about the ecosystem around the framework itself both on the free and paid sides including Laravel Cashier, Homestead, Valet and Forge. Joe also talks about his approach to the framework back in the Laravel 3 days and how he came into the community and, eventually, started helping out with the Homestead project.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio or video player you can also download the mp3 directly for listening offline. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates when the latest shows are released.

On the Laravel News site there's an announcement posted about a change in the Laravel release schedule, an update from the original 2013 announcement.

Yesterday, Taylor announced on Twitter that this is going to be changing to a January and July cycle, pushing each release out a month from its current schedule.

This has two primary advantages for the development team and the first is it allows more time for testing after Symfony’s release. The second advantage is it’ll better coincide with Laracon, the yearly Laravel conference.

This means a bit of a delay on the release of the next major version of the framework (v5.4) but only by one month. The six month cycle will then resume after that slight delay. You can find out more about the remainder of the release cycle in the original post based on Taylor's comments at Laracon 2013.

The Full Stack Radio podcast, hosted by Adam Wathan, has posted their latest episode - an interview with Taylor Otwell, creator and lead developer on the Laravel (and most of the projects in its ecosystem).

In this episode, Adam and Taylor Otwell have a discussion about strategies they use to write cleaner, simpler code when working with the Laravel framework.

They talk about several of the other packages/products in the Laravel ecosystem (like Valet, Spark and Passport) as well as some of Taylor's thoughts on simplifying code including a few other links to presentations and tutorials on the same 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 their feed and follow them on Twitter for updates on when new episodes are released.

The Laravel News podcast, hosted by Eric Barnes and Jack Fruh, has shared its latest episode today: Episode #25 - Laravel 5.3 and Shift with Taylor Otwell and Jason McCreary.

In this episode, we are joined by Taylor Otwell and Jason McCreary to discuss Laravel 5.3, Laravel's first hire, and Laravel Shift.

Besides the topics already mentioned they also discuss Laravel Forge and Laravel Passport. You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the episode directly. If you enjoy the show be sure to subscribe to their feed or on iTunes/Google Play to get the latest episodes as they're released.

On the Laravel News site there's a post sharing some of the results from a recent request for feedback from Taylor Otwell (creator of the Laravel framework) asking the Reddit community for their own experiences contributing to the Laravel project.

Taylor created a feedback thread on Reddit asking the community on why they do not contribute as well as asking for suggestions on how to manage issues.

Taylor said in the thread, “One thing that has been bothering me is I have seen a few people say they don’t contribute to Laravel because it seems like PRs get closed or shot down without much explanation. [...] Taylor continues, “My biggest challenge is the “Issues” tab on GitHub. It gets a lot of activity and its hard to filter out genuine issues from support requests, configuration problems, general questions, etc”.

Among the opinions shared in the responses were comments about how feedback was given by a certain member of the Laravel development team. Taylor has already said that processes have been put in motion to help make this situation better and move people to where they're most productive. The thread and shares a lot of other opinions besides just this, so if you're considering contributing it's worth a read.

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.