Revamping Laravel News

I silently revamped this site last weekend and I’ve had a few people ask me about it. To answer all the questions in one go I’ll outline all the changes and a little history behind it.

Laravel News started as a twitter account that I created in February of 2012, which is just after I started working with Taylor. The idea was just to retweet and share things related to Laravel. Over time it grew in followers and I posted things when I had time. No real rhyme or reason.

January of this year I started using Tumblr with the plan to keep that same format. Share things I find interesting related to Laravel, but go a step farther and use the link blog format. This allows me to share interesting things that come up throughout the day. As well as write more long form articles as I have the time. Tweets have a very short life cycle and I wanted a real place to reach not only those on twitter but via RSS and other mediums.

Tumblr was great for this but as my post count continues to climb finding older information became more and more difficult. The limited theming options and having no control made me want to switch. I spent quite a few hours trying different CMS/Blogging systems but wasn’t super happy. Of course I created Wardrobe but it had downsides as well. Most notably it only supported regular text posts.

In the end I decided I would just use Wardrobe after all. I took a day off work and started on v2. My goal was to get it usable for my needs by the end of the day and I did accomplish this. This version isn’t released yet but I haven’t had any major issues. I also changed the structure of Wardrobe to try and make it more user friendly.

Check out the v2 branch and the cabinet backend if you have interest in this. Now, the wardrobe base is a fresh install of Laravel with pre-set routes and controllers. This way you have full access to change the front facing side as much as you want. I feel like this gives way more flexibility and doesn’t need all kinds of over rides in the composer part of the app. I’ll be publishing more information on all this once I get a stable v2 ready.

I want this site to be a great resource for Laravel and like everything it will continue to be a work in progress. Since the move I’ve added a newsletter so you can get a weekly archive, restructured the content (more to do here), and added a weekly sponsor. The sponsorship is a way for me to hopefully break even on the site expenses or best case make some side money to take my wife out to dinner. :)

I want to thank the community for creating all the awesome resources. I hope you find this site useful and a good resource in your Laravel development. If you do have feedback don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.