Laravel 8.11, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip

Laravel 8.11

Less in this week's release. But still a few new features bringing us to 8.11.0.

  • Use fresh and refresh on pivots and morph pivots in #34836
  • Preserve Eloquent collection type after calling fresh in #34848
  • Provisional support for PHP 8.0 in #34884

You may review the full branch diff on GitHub for a complete list of changes.

This minor version bump and update is automated for subscribers to a Shifty Plan. If you don't have one of those, be sure to bump your constraint and run composer update.

Weekly Journal

Finished up most of the Human Shifts last week. Also had some Pairing sessions to help guide fellow Laravel devs with their upgrade and application architecture.

I spent a morning with Freek last week switching from MailChimp to Mailcoach. I'd been meaning to do this for a while as it's not only a cost savings, but puts that money back into the Laravel community. So if you noticed a slight design change this week, that's because this was sent with Mailcoach.

Jess also finished a nice little quality of life improvement when creating a Shift. We gave the form a bit of memory for your past repositories and branches by using a <datalist> tag as cross betwene a dropdown and auto-complete.

I also brought in Ryan Chandler to help with the Shift facelift. My time will become limited over the next month once baby girl arrives. So, again, glad to put some money back into the Laravel community.

This week I hope to finish the custom webhook build for subscribers to run against their open PRs. That will round out the initial improvements I wanted to do for the Shifty Plans.

🔥 Tip

This week I actually have a coding tip related to PHP. While these days I'm mostly browsing the Laravel Docs, the PHP docs are still a great reference. I've always appreciate the detailed descriptions, code examples, and "See Also" links.

But another section that may go unnoticed are the user comments. Occasionally you'll find a pretty nice gem in there, like this handy one-liner to read a CSV file into an array.

1$csv = array_map('str_getcsv', file('data.csv'));