Laracon: Laravel 5.3 Recap

Today at Laracon US, Taylor Otwell, gave a talk covering many new features for 5.3 and it included four major items: Laravel Scout, Laravel Passport, Laravel Mailable, and Laravel Notifications.

The talk was scheduled for ninety minutes, and Taylor used every bit of it talking as fast as he could to cover these four features in the time allotted. Let’s take a look at these new features.

Laravel Scout

Laravel Scout is a driver based full-text search for Eloquent. Out of the box, it supports Algolia and because it’s driver based anyone in the community can create their own integration with other full-text search systems.

Scout works by implementing a “Searchable” trait with your existing models. Then it’s just a matter of syncing the data with the search service like this:

php artisan scout:import App\\Post

After that you can search your models with:

Post::search('Alice')->get();

You can even paginate:

Post::search('Alice')->paginate()

And it even includes simple where clauses:

Post::search(‘Alice’)—>where('acount_id', '>', 1)->paginate()

Laravel Mailable

Laravel Mailable is a new Mail class for sending emails in an expressive way:

Mail::to('laravel@example.com')->send(new OrderComplete);

Of course you can use all the other mail features as well:

Mail::to('laravel@example.com')->cc('john@example.com')->queue(new OrderComplete);

Laravel Notifications

Laravel Notifications allow you to make quick updates through services like Slack, SMS, or Email.

Notifications ship with a responsive transactional email template. In your notification class all that is needed to send a message is code like this:

$this->line('Thank you for joining')
    ->action('Button Text', 'http://url.com')
    ->line('If you have any questions please hit reply')
    ->success()

Or if it’s an error:

$this->line('Sorry we had a problem with your order')
    ->action('Button Text', 'http://url.com')
    ->error()

Laravel Passport

Laravel Passport is an optional package that is a full oAuth 2 server ready to go.

You can set your scopes, Vue.js components for token generation, revoking tokens, and more.

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All of these features will be fully documented for the official release, which is scheduled to come out in a few weeks. It’s definitely exciting, and I can’t wait to start utilizing some of these new features.