On the TutsPlus.com site they've posted a guide sharing some of the new features that have come with the 5.2 version of the Laravel framework. With v5.3 on the horizon, it's good to get a solid base with 5.2 first.

In this article, I will take a look at the new features of Laravel 5.2 and describe them one by one. The new features are [...]: implicit route model binding, form array validation, API rate-limiting middleware, middleware groups, authentication scaffold and multiple authentication guard drivers

The post then goes through each of these topics providing a bit of explanation of what they're about and how they can be useful. There's also snippets of code included where helpful to show off the feature and provide a more useful example.

The Laravel News site has posted about the release of Laravel 5.2, the next minor release in the 5.x series of the framework. Along with this release comes several new features and additions to current ones:

Laravel 5.2 is now officially released and available to everyone. This release features multiple authentication driver support, implicit model binding, simplified Eloquent global scopes, opt-in authentication scaffolding, middleware groups, rate limiting middleware, array validation improvements, and more.

He then gets into a bit of detail about these new features added including:

• Auth Scaffolding
• Implicit model binding
• Laravel 5.2 Form Array Validation
• Database Session Driver
• Middleware Groups
• Rate Limiting

There's brief code examples for each of the items (where needed) and links back to the documentation for more information on the feature's use.

Matt Stauffer continues his series looking at the improvements in Laravel 5.2 with this new post talking about the included rate limiting functionality.

More and more of my work in Laravel lately has been creating APIs. I have a manual rate limiter class I've been using, but I've had a sense that there's a cleaner way to do it. Unsurprisingly, when Taylor set out to write a rate limiter middleware for Laravel, he did it cleaner and better than I had.

Matt briefly introduces the concept of rate limiting and how some optional headers (in the X- family) can be used to let the end user/script know when their requests will be rate limited: X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining and Retry-After. He then gets into the example of it in use, showing how to simply add the middleware to the routing and the results in the HTTP response. He ends the post with a bit on customizing the middleware, updating both the times per minute setting and a "block" time limit for when to completely block out the user.

Matt Stauffer has continued his series looking at the new features of Laravel v5.2. In this new article he talks about the addition of implicit route model binding. This is a bit more fancy term for the ability to link models to routes and tell Laravel they're related.

If you've never used it, Laravel's route model binding has been around for a while, but Laravel 5.2 is about to make it even easier. [...] In your route service provider, just teach the router: $router->model('shoe', 'AppShoe'); That means, "any time I have a route parameter named shoe, it's an ID representing an instance of AppShoe". [...] In Laravel 5.2, it's even easier to use route model binding. Just typehint a parameter in the route Closure (or your controller method) and name the parameter the same thing as the route parameter.

He includes code examples of the "old way" to do it with model functionality inside the route and the "new way" of linking the model to the route. This allows you to auto-magically have a valid model instance once the route is called. He also shares some of the little known features of this model binding including using closures in bind() calls and changing the "route key" away from the "id" column.