Matt Stauffer has posted the latest article in his "New Features in Laravel 5.3" series today. In this new tutorial Matt focuses on the creation of console commands - additional functionality you can add in to the pre-existing "artisan" command handling.

Before Laravel 5.3, defining an Artisan console command—something like php artisan sync:dates—required you to create a new class for that command and register it in the Console Kernel. This is fine, but sometimes it feels like overkill for what might end up just being a single line of functional code.

As of Laravel 5.3, you'll notice that there's a new method in the Console/Kernel.php file named commands(), and it loads a new file at routes/console.php. This new "console routes" file allows us to define Artisan console commands with a single Closure instead the prior "define a class then register it in the console Kernel" flow. Much faster, much easier.

In v5.3 you define commands using "routes" along with a simple description using fluent statements. He shows how to add a simple command, one with input and a more streamlined example pulling values directly from the "route" signature.

Continuing his series about new functionality in Laravel v5.3 Matt Stauffer has posted this quick article covering updates to the queue worker functionality.

Queues are one of those tools in Laravel that everyone knows is there, but very few people understand deeply. It's understandable--Laravel is often the first place folks have run into queues, and to be honest, they're not simple.

Thankfully, very little has changed on a user-facing front with regard to how queues work in Laravel 5.3.

One of the main updates is that the "listen" command is now "work" and the action then runs as a daemon by default instead of requiring the command to be long-running. He talks about the difference in this shift and how something like Supervisor can now be used to manage the daemon (including some documentation specific to Laravel). He finishes the post looking at what has changed "under the hood" and the benefits the changes bring.

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 detailing some of the updates made to session and controller handling in v5.3 of the framework. It mostly revolves around how the middleware handling changed on each request from v5.2.

Back in laravel 5.2, a developer was able to interact with the session directly in a controller constructor. However, this has changed in laravel 5.3.

The difference between how the 5.3 & 5.2 handle an incoming request is that in 5.2 the request goes through 3 pipelines: global, route and controller [...] In 5.3 the request goes through only 2 Pipelines: global and route/controller (in one pipeline).

The post includes a quote from Taylor Otwell (creator and lead developer of the framework) about why this change was made. Then it shows an alternative to directly accessing this session information in your controllers: a Closure-based middleware in the constructor to execute your checks.

The Scotch.io blog has posted another Laravel-related tutorial, this time focusing in on "mailables", a new feature in the latest release of Laravel (v5.3) that makes sending emails simpler.

Laravel 5.3 has just been released and there are a ton of great new features. One of the major improvements is in how you send mail in your applications.

They start with a look at how you might send emails in previous versions of the Laravel framework using the Mail::send method with a set of options and a callback. The tutorial then moves on to v5.3 and introduces the idea behind "mailables" and some simple examples. They show how to create a custom mailable-based class and the resulting code. They walk you through how to pass data into the email views, changing up the mailer configuration, sending extra parameters and sending the emails. They also include information about email queueing using Laravel's built-in queuing functionality.

As is mentioned in this new post on the Laravel News site, the latest version of the Laravel framework (v5.3) has officially been released:

The Laravel team is proud to announce the release of Laravel 5.3 and it’s now available for everyone. The new features in 5.3 are focused on improving developer speed by adding additional out of the box improvements for common tasks.

This is a general release and comes with six months of bug fixes and security fixes are provided for one year. Laravel 5.1 is the latest LTS release which includes bug fixes for two years and security fixes for three years.

The post also lists some of the major updates that come with the v5.3 release including:

• New Home Page (for the project)
• New packages like Laravel Passport, Laravel Scout and Laravel Echo
• Updated migration handling
• Queued job improvements

You can read the full list of changes in the rest of the post including a link to an upgrade guide for those migrating from previous versions.

In another of his series of posts about the upcoming version of the Laravel framework (v5.3) Matt Stauffer focuses in on some of the changes in routing that are coming down the line.

The last few versions of Laravel have showed the way routing works shifting around a bit. This is usually a sign that we're feeling some sort of pain—something feels off—but haven't found the perfect solution yet. In 5.3, we may have found it.

He starts by looking at some of the routing changes that happened when v5.2 was released including the change away from two groups ("web" and "api"). In v5.3 the major change is the location of the routes definitions containing all of the routes in your application. In the update, this relocation (into a directory) allows you to define multiple route configurations that can be individually changed based on features rather than one global place. He also includes an example of how you can set up your RouteServiceProvider to load in custom configurations as well.

Matt Stauffer is back with another in his series of posts about the new features coming in the v5.3 release of the popular Laravel framework. In the latest post he looks at pagination improvements allowing you to customize the related templates.

Laravel's pagination library is brilliant, because pagination is a common task that is a surprising amount of work to implement. In the past, if you wanted to customize your pagination templates, it was just as simple to customize your pagination template as it was to work with the rest of the pagination library.

However, for the sake of making the pagination library easier to extract for non-Laravel projects, Laravel 5.0 (or maybe even earlier?) introduced a much more complex—but more portable—system for pagination templates. Thankfully, in Laravel 5.3, we're going to go back to how it always was: simple and easy.

He then gets into the basics of how pagination works in Laravel applications (not the template part, the backend) using the Task::paginate handling. He includes the view to just show the results and the current view handling for the pagination links. Finally he shows how to customize the template in v5.3 by registering a custom view to the partials.paginator and using the links method to inject them into your current template.

Continuing his series looking at the features coming in Laravel 5.3, Matt Stauffer has posted his latest article in the series covering some of the image validation rules that the update will include.

In Laravel 5.3, we have a new validation option: image dimensions for image uploads. The validation rule is called dimensions, and you can pass the following parameters to it: min_width, max_width, min_height, max_height, width, height and ratio.

This provides a simplified version of many of these checks you might have been doing manually in the past (and fits in with the Laravel validation structure). He gives a few examples of verifying images from a basic form submission. The validations are put on the "avatar" field and work much like the other validation definitions with the checks "stacked" and separated by the pipe character ("|").

On the Laravel News site there's a post detailing out some of the new things coming to Laravel 5.3 currently still in development but should be released in the near future.

Laravel 5.3 is currently in development and with all new Laravel releases, new features are being teased out as they are added. Here is a quick look at some of these new features.

The list of these new features includes:

• Eloquent Collections are cleanly serialized and re-pulled by queued jobs
• Queue console output changed to show the actual class names
• First Or Create [now takes additional values]
• Multiple Migration Paths

There's also a mention of the Laravel Echo functionality that makes in-app broadcasting simpler. For some of the topics there's links to other posts with more information too.