On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a recent article posted by Christopher Vundi looking at the new features coming in Laravel 5.5, the next major release of the popular PHP framework.

Laravel 5.5 will require PHP 7.0+. For the features this modern PHP version brings, please see our recap.

Laravel 5.5 will also be the next LTS (Long Term Support) release. This means bugfixes for two years and three years of security updates. That was also the case with Laravel 5.1, but its two-year window of bug fixes is coming to an end this year. Without further ado, let’s see what this new version has to offer.

Instead of just describing the new features, the article opts to walk you through the installation of v5.5 and showing examples of each. Topics covered include:

• Rendering Mailables to the Browser
• Exception Helper Functions
• Introducing the migrate:fresh Command
• Automatic Package Discovery
• Whoops is Back!
• Custom Exception Report Method
• Validation Data Return
• Custom Blade::if() Directives
• Autoregistering of New Artisan Commands in the Kernel

...among many others. There's a long list of new features coming in this release and the tutorial covers each nicely and provides the code examples it would take to make it all work.

Matt Stauffer has a new post to his site sharing some of the new features and updates to Laravel that were announced at Laracon US 2017. This is the second post in his series covering what's new in Laravel 5.5.

He was updating the post as the items were announced (live-blogging) and now the post has the complete list:

• Frontend presets
• New routing options
• Blade::if
• Renderable mailable
• Renderable Exceptions
• Responsable interface
• One-off Notifications
• Validation improvements
• TrustedProxy package brought internally
• Migrate:fresh
• New database migration trait
• WithoutExceptionHandling middleware
• Dusk improvements
• Package auto-discovery
• Vendor:publish menu
• Auto-registered console commands
• Job chaining
• Better missing model handling in jobs

As you can see the list is quite long and filled with both updates to current functionality and with new features. Check out the full post for information on each - some come with descriptions and other with commands/code to show them in action.

The Scotch.io site has posted a new article sharing some of the new features and changes that are coming with Laravel 5.5, the next major release of the framework.

At the time of this writing, Laravel 5.5 is not released yet. It is slated, as the next major release, for release in July 2017. To play around with new features and changes, you need to grab the dev release of Laravel using this Laravel Installer command: laravel new project --dev

The article starts by pointing out that this version will require at least PHP 7.0, a supported and much more performant version of the language. It then covers the changes in this version including:

• the reintroduction of the "Whoops" library for debugging/error handling
• a change to vendor:publish to get a new provider prompt
• email themes
• automatic package discovery
• error page design improvements
• streamlined request validation
• exception helper functions
• model factory generators

Each of these items comes with screenshots or code examples showing the new feature at work. It also ends with a few miscellaneous updates mentioning changes in the CSRF handling and the return of a JSON stack trace for API calls.

On the Laravel News site there's a recent post showing a feature coming in version 5.5 of the framework that will help make creating error views easier:

Coming in Laravel 5.5 is a new and improved design for the error pages. The default errors will extend from an errors::layout file and get some small design additions over the current style with flexbox and a vertically centered message.

They compare the older version to the newer, cleaner one and how you can still, even in 5.5, have your own custom error pages named based on the HTTP error code (like 500.blade.php or 403.blade.php). They end the post covering the renderHttpException and how it determines which of the error templates to use.

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.