In a new post to his site Christoph Rumpel lists out his top three features of Laravel 5.6 that he enjoys and finds the most useful.

Yesterday Taylor Otwell released Laravel 5.6 right before the Laracon Online conference. We had a little conference party here in Vienna and a great time watching all the talks together. In one of them Taylor walked us through the new Laravel features and I want to point out my top 3 of them.

For each of his top three he provides some code examples and screenshots where appropriate:

• the addition of the Collision package
• dynamic rate limiting on route definitions
• Eloquent date casting (enhancing the "casts" functionality already present from v5.5)

For more information on the other new features that v5.6 include, check out this series of posts from Laravel News.

As this post to Laravel News mentions the upcoming v5.6 release of the framework will remove the artisan optimize functionality from the project's artisan command line tool.

The Artisan optimize command is deprecated as of 5.5, and a commit in master has already removed it from 5.6. Waiting until 5.6 gives you time to update your build scripts and composer.json files ahead of the release.

As of Laravel 5.5, the composer.json no longer references optimize in the post-install-cmd and post-update-cmd scripts. The Optimize command is still defined, but does nothing in 5.5.

The project has provided some reasoning behind the change, mostly having to do with the overall performance improvements in the PHP language itself. Additionally, there was some discussion around the removal before it was finalized.

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.