Laravel 8.44, weekly updates, and 🔥 tip
Laravel 8.44
No release this week. But there was a patch release last week which included some new features and brings us to 8.44.0. Which creates another equation of: 8 - 4 - 4 = 0
Here are the highlights:
- Fix aggregates with having methods in #37487
- Relax the lazy loading restrictions in #37503
- Delegate lazy loading violation to method in #37480
- Allow symlink recreation in storage:link command in #37501
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 to get the latest features.
Weekly Journal
Last week Jess and I continued to work on the secret project. We are finally ready for the alpha release. So this week I'm going to get it in the hands of the early testers and let them use it for a bit.
It is funny because I said the last 10% is the most time-consuming and yesterday I came across this tweet, which also had a nice play on math.
I also completed most of the functionality for the marketing and purchasing. Jess is also helping to finish up the UI components.
Today I plan to work on the Laravel 8.x Shift to build in automation for the optional changes. I'll release them tomorrow and with that bump the price to $19.
I'll likely keep this practice moving forward. I want to maintain that low $9 price point. However, as an incentive to stay current and with the new annual release cycle, I will increase the price of the latest Laravel Shift to $19 after a shorter period of time.
🔥 Tip
Last week I came across a tweet about learning PHP through Laravel. There are many large, open source projects which serve as a gateway into PHP. I do think Laravel is one of the better examples.
With that said, nothing replaces the need to know the language itself. So for this week's 🔥 tip, I recommend scrolling through the PHP docs for the array functions and string functions.
PHP comes with nearly 100 built-in array and string functions. Knowing at least of these functions has proven invaluable for me over the years. Even more of the functions were added in PHP 8. In fact, some of which overlap with the Laravel helpers.