As 2016 is coming to a close it’s a great time to look back on the year and see just how much progress has been made. Laravel had a busy year with 5.3 being released, Laracon, updates to all the components, and now gearing up for the Laravel 5.4 release.
To look back on the year I’ve put together a list of some of the hits of 2016 and arranged them by month so you can get a quick overview of all the highlights.
January
Stripe Donations with Laravel Learn how to allow people to send you donations through Stripe in this tutorial and sample project.
Lumen 5.2 is now released Lumen 5.2 released with the Laravel 5.2 components and changed it’s philosophy to solely focus on serving stateless, JSON APIs.
Laravel Shift Started Laravel Shift, the project aimed at automatically upgrading Laravel apps, got its start.
The Laravel Release Process A brief look at the Laravel release cycle and when each new version is scheduled to come out.
February
LaraChat Live Episode #1 LaraChat had their first live chat with introductions from community members and a meet & greet.
Operator Font This commercial font took the community by storm and it’s been gaining in popularity ever since.
Laravel Homestead adds MariaDB Support MySQL had a memory bug at the beginning of the year and it caused headaches for a lot of people. That pushed a lot of developers to start using MariaDB instead and Homestead and Forge added support.
Laravel and WordPress A look at several packages and tutorials for integrating WordPress with Laravel.
March
Composer releases Beta 1 Crazy that this was the first official beta when it was so popular.
Using the ::class keyword in Laravel
Christoph Rumpel wrote a tutorial on using the ::class keyword in PHP and Laravel.
Cashier added Braintree support With Braintree support, it’s the first time you could support Paypal subscriptions.
Building your first Laravel Application A tutorial for those new to the framework on building your first simple application.
Laravel Backup v3 Freek Van der Herten released v3 of the Spatie Backup manager. This release added a whole host of new features including email/slack notifications, Artisan health checks, and more.
Katana – Blade powered static site & blog generator Katana is a PHP static site & blog generator with markdown support. Using it you can deploy with Github pages or your own hosting environment.
Laravel Internals Discussion Moved to Github The internals discussion moved to Github and away from IRC and Slack.
GitHub Adds Reactions to Pull Requests, Issues, and Comments This was huge news and I believe it helped clean up a lot of the +1’s in everyones issue tracker.
Github relaxes API limit for Composer Installs Previously, you had to add an API key before you could run composer install on a fresh Laravel install. With GitHub making this change it greatly improved the first run experience of the framework.
Add Laravel Tests Directly From Chrome Marcel Pociot launched a Chrome Extension that allows you to visually create acceptance tests directly from the browser.
One developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript As you can imagine, much drama ensued.
Statamic v2 and powered by Laravel Statamic, the flat file CMS, launched v2 and moved their backend to Laravel and Vue.js
April
Composer announces v1.0 Composer hit v1 and put up a gold floppy disk for auction on eBay. It sold for £1,020.00.
Laravel Cheat Sheet The EST Group released a cheat sheet that shows you many of the Laravel features from a filterable web app.
Spark Beta is now available Laravel Spark released its first beta.
Vue.js V2 first public preview is announced Vue.js announced their first public preview of v2 with a focus on speed and memory.
May
Announcing Laravel Valet Laravel Valet came out and I’ve been using it ever since! Here is a write up on my first look at Valet
Laravel Valet with Adam and Taylor In this episode of the Laravel News podcast, we are Joined by Taylor and Adam to discuss everything about Valet, how it came to be and the amazingly short time from idea to completed product. They talk about the internals, how it works, how external sharing works, the driver architecture and more.
The “Official” Laravel Blog Laravel News became the official Laravel blog of the framework. It was an exciting day for me.
Query Tracer Package Laravel Query Tracer is a new package by Trevor Fitzgerald that allows you to find exactly where a query is being called in your app.
Laravel API Generator Package Marcel Pociot released a new package that will automatically generate API documentation from your existing routes.
June
Rollback one migration This feature was added to Laravel 5.3 that allows you to back out a single migration.
Laravel Turns Five Laravel had its fifth birthday!
PyroCMS v3 is announced PyroCMS released v3 and they moved from CodeIgniter to Laravel.
Mailthief MailThief is a new package by Tighten Co. that provides a fake mailer for your Laravel application. This makes it easy to test email without actually sending any.
Laravel and Elasticsearch A look at several packages and tutorials for integrating Elasticsearch with Laravel. This was before Laravel Scout came about.
July
Canvas – A new minimal blogging app A minimal blogging app created by Todd Austin that features writing in markdown with the Summernote WYSIWYG, a media uploader, post tags, and post scheduling.
October CMS releases their first stable version October, one of the first Laravel powered CMS, released their first stable version.
Github now supports Blade syntax highlighting Github added support for Blade syntax highlighting on both your repos and Gists.
Laracon Special edition of the podcast The Laracon US 2016 Special With Taylor Otwell, Evan You, Chris Fidao, and Adam Wathan
August
Laracon Recap An overview of this years Laracon US in Louisville.
Video: Taylor Otwell covering new features for Laravel 5.3 The conference video of Taylor covering new features of Laravel 5.3
Laravel News rebranded and relaunched After becoming the official blog of Laravel I decided it was time to improve this site and I worked with Zaengle to create a whole new brand and design.
Laravel Scout Laravel Scout announced it’s availability for developer testing.
Laravel Passport Creating your own OAuth server has never been easier!
Laravel 5.3 is released A lot of great new tools included in this release.
September
How to Create A Most Popular List with Laravel and Google Analytics Learn how to create a most popular or trending list with this package.
Lumen 5.3 is released A maintenance release that brought it’s core components up to date with Laravel 5.3.
Laravel 5.3.8 is released New features include fakes for events, jobs, mail, and notifications.
Vim 8.0 is released Their first major release in 10 years.
Angular 2.0 final is now released Angular hit v2, moved to semvar, and more.
Computer Vision Syndrome Staring at screens all day isn’t good for us. Learn how to take care of your eyes.
Vue.js V2 is now released Vue V2 features better performance, server-side rendering, and the Vue tools have all been updated.
Building a Search Engine Friendly Sitemap XML with Laravel Here is a tutorial on creating your own search engine friendly sitemap through Laravel and Blade.
October
Laravel Links Relaunches The community links section here on Laravel News relaunched and is now integrated with the current design.
Laracon EU Keynote Video of Taylor’s Laracon EU 2016 Keynote
Model Factory States Laravel 5.3.17 was released and featured an improvement to Model Factories that you allows to define different “states” for a factory.
Improvements to the Laravel unique and exists validation rules Laravel v5.3.18 released with a new form validation Rule class to help you simplify your rules.
Image Dimensions Validation Laravel v5.3.19 released with more validation improvements including image dimensions, array support added to in and not_in rules, and an after validation hook
Laravel v4.2.20 is now released This gives those still running v4.x support for PHP 7.0.
Voyager Voyager is a new package created by The Control Group that provides a complete admin system to quickly scaffold out your app.
Laravel Charting Package Erik Campobadal created a Laravel chart package to create interactive charts. It supports a dozen of the most popular charting libraries from standard line and bar charts, to the real-time charting libraries.
November
A Roundup of Laravel CMS Packages A quick look at some of the popular content management systems built on Laravel.
Automatically Send Tweets through Laravel Notifications Learn how to automatically send tweets utilizing Notifications.
An introduction to Rollup Learn about Rollup, the next-generation JavaScript module bundler.
Spark Integration Tests Laravel Spark open sourced its integration tests and it can be used as a learning source to see how others do their testing.
Laravel 5.4 features start being announced November is when new features coming to 5.4 started leaking out. Checkout this category to see a list of some of what is coming to the next version.
Laravel Up and Running Matt Stauffer launched his new book and I had a chance to interview him.
December
Auto Publishing to Telegram using Notification Channels Learn how to send updates to Telegram using Laravel’s Notification system.
PHP 7.1 The PHP team has released 7.1.0 that includes new features such as Nullable types, Void return type, Class constant visibility modifiers, and more.
Homestead adds PHP 7.1 support Laravel Homestead, the Vagrant box for easily running Laravel on any platform, released v4.0 that includes support for the just released PHP 7.1.
Laravel View Exist In this quick tip, learn how to utilize Laravel’s view exist method.
Valet 2.0 Laravel Valet released v2 with a move to Nginx, PHP 7.1, and other speed improvements.
Laravel 5.5 will require PHP 7.0+ Laravel announced that v5.5 due in July of 2017 will be increasing the minimum PHP version to 7.0+
Laravel Backpack Backpack for Laravel is a collection of packages which allows you to create admin panels for any web app quickly. It provides a set of useful packages divided into three categories that will make the process of creating a highly customizable admin panel easier.
Just in time knowledge Learn what you need to know and forget the rest.
Laravel Dusk Announced Dusk is an end-to-end browser testing tool for JavaScript enabled applications. It aims to provide the right way to do page interaction tests, so you can use Dusk for things like click buttons/links, fill out forms, and even drag and drop!
Laravel continued to grow in 2016 and here is a chart showing it’s search interest over time:
Outside of the search interest, it’s now the fourth most popular framework on Github based on stars. Behind meteor, rails, and express.
Eric is the creator of Laravel News and has been covering Laravel since 2012.
