Matt Stauffer has posted the latest in his "What's new in Laravel 5.4' series with this new post covering Laravel Mix. Mix is a reworking of the Laravel Elixir package in previous framework releases but has changed a few things up in the process.

Laravel Mix. The same and yet entirely different from Laravel Elixir.

If you're not familiar with Laravel Elixir, it's a wrapper around Gulp that makes it really simple to handle common build steps—CSS pre-processing like Sass and Less, JavaScript processing like Browserify and Webpack, and more.

In Laravel 5.4, Elixir has been replaced by a new project called Mix. The tools have the same end goals, but go about it in very different ways.

He starts with a look at what's new about Mix and how it differs from previous version of Elixir. This includes changes in the structure of the configuration file, a different files/folders structure, helpers and quite a few other changes. Matt gets into detail on each item, providing code examples for the changes and a brief summary of how it's different for those that might have used Elixir before. Check out the full post for the full details.

At the Laravel News site mentions, the latest version of the Laravel framework has been released: Laravel 5.4.

Version 5.4 of Laravel is now officially released! This release has many new features, and improvements.

A video is included in the post showing some of these features and improvements as well as a text-based version with a bit more detail. Topics include:

• Laravel Dusk
• Blade components and slots
• Markdown emails
• Route improvements
• Higher order messaging for collections

Each item in the post comes with a brief explanation of the feature and a code snippet showing how it can be used. It also finishes with some of the smaller updates and links to the 4.5 upgrade guide to help you migrate your current application.

As is mentioned in this post on the Laravel News site one of the improvements coming in Laravel v5.4 will be the ability to use Markdown formatting in your emails.

Laravel 5.3 introduced two new features around email, the Mailables and Notifications which allow you to send the same message through email, SMS, and other channels.

Building on top of these improvements, Laravel 5.4 is going to include a brand new Markdown system for creating email templates.

Under the hood, this feature implements the Parsedown parser with its companion, Markdown Extra so you can use tables.

They go on to describe how this feature is integrated with the "components and slots" handling also recently introduced in the framework for things like headers, messages, layouts and tables. Also included is some example code showing how to return the Markdown parsed version of a view, using them in notifications and how to use inline styling.

The Laravel News site has a quick new post about some routing improvements that are coming in the next larger release of the framework , Laravel v5.4:

As Laravel 5.4 development continues, two new improvements are coming to your routes, better route caching for large applications and fluently registering routes.

The route caching updates will help performance with larger applications, reducing the parsing time required to locate and push a request to the right location. The "fluent" route improvements basically allow for the definition of some things, like middleware or route names, as a part of the route definition rather than after the fact. Examples of this are included in the post.

As mentioned on the main PHP.net site today, three new versions of the language have been released to address various bugfix issues: PHP versions 5.4.43, 5.5.27 and 5.6.11.

The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of [these PHP versions]. Five security-related issues in PHP were fixed in this release, including CVE-2015-3152. All PHP 5.6 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.

One note here too - 5.5.27 is the last official bugfix release according to the release calendar for that major version. Upgrading to PHP 5.6 is encouraged (the next supported version). As always you can grab these latest downloads from the main downloads page (or windows.php.net) and see the full list of changes in the Changelog for each version.