What is coming to Laravel.io

Shawn McCool announced on twitter than the new Laravel.io will be launching Friday and I wanted to share a few of the new features headed your way.

#GitHub Authentication

GitHub auth is not secondary. It’s going to be the only way of interacting.

This is controversial to some. However, it solves an incredible amount of problems with the current community setup and we feel that it will result in improved interactions on the forums, remove bot spam, allow people to get to know one another better and prevent the need for our members to have even more accounts around the web to deal with.

I fully agree with this decision. Handling spam is a nightmare on community projects and the more than can be done to eliminate it is worth doing. Plus the target demographic is developers and I can’t really imagine someone not having a GitHub account.

#Community Articles

The idea is to allow community members the ability to post their own articles, tutorials, tips, and etc. I would have to assume this will be linked to your account and give you your own mini portal within the site.

#Universal Tagging

The entire Laravel.io app uses a universal tagging system.

I’m undecided if this will be useful or not. Thinking about finding things related to an issue might be tricky at times. Especially those new to Laravel that might not be up on the verbiage.

#Automatic Embedding of Gists

To go along with the GitHub auth it will also incorporate Gists into forum posts and articles. I see this as a good thing and in theory gives you double exposer from GitHub and Laravel.io searches.

I know this has been in beta for a while now and I am excited to see it finally rolled out. Laravel is growing every day and having a nice community portal should be beneficial to everyone.