Your Favorite Laravel Plugin is Now Free
The game-changing Laravel Idea plugin is now free, plus deep dives into performance tuning, code architecture, and the latest PHP & Symfony releases.
As we head into mid-August, the summer project push is in full swing. I was reminded of the importance of good tooling last week while refactoring a legacy payment module. What started as a simple task quickly spiraled into a mess of dependencies and side effects. It’s in those moments you truly appreciate a well-structured codebase and the tools that help you navigate it.
This week’s issue is packed with articles that speak directly to that experience, from deep dives into performance tuning with PHP-FPM to leveraging Laravel Actions for cleaner, reusable code. These aren’t just theoretical concepts; they’re practical solutions to the everyday challenges we face building robust applications.
But the biggest news, and a massive win for the entire community, is that the Laravel Idea plugin for PhpStorm is now completely free! This is an essential tool that streamlines development in countless ways. If you’re a PhpStorm user, this is a game-changer you’ll want to install immediately. Let’s dive in!
🧪 Beta testers wanted for Kaiden — AI chat‑based nutrition & health
I’m looking for alpha/beta testers for Kaiden, a chat‑based PWA to help with nutrition, fitness, and daily wellness.
Log meals through conversation or with a photo.
Track your calories and workouts.
Log your weight, fat percentage, and generate custom graphs to see your progress.
And, ask for advices, improvement on your diet or workout, everything depending on your data and objetive.
🔗 → Try it now: kaiden.chat — 100% free, no credit card required.
Would really appreciate feedback on UX, agent helpfulness, syncing… any bugs you find!
PHP
This document outlines the key parameters within a PHP-FPM pool configuration, essential for tuning PHP performance and managing server resources effectively.
📚 Hack Shared Hosting: Use Composer 2 + PHP 8.3 Without Root Access!
Because sometimes, all you need is a modern dev environment — and your hosting provider says no.
📚 Understanding PHP Variables and Data Types: A Beginner’s Guide with Examples
In this guide, you’ll learn what variables are, how to use them, and the different types of data they can hold.
📚 PHP 8.5.0 Alpha 4 available for testing
The PHP team is pleased to announce the third testing release of PHP 8.5.0, Alpha 4. This continues the PHP 8.5 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.
📚 PHP 8.4.11 & PHP 8.3.24 Released!
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.4.11 & PHP 8.3.24. This is a bug fix release. All PHP 8.4 users are encouraged to upgrade to this version.
📚 Test creation methods on steroids with named parameters
In my previous blog post about writing high quality tests I mentioned that writing test code in the most minimalistic way will improve maintainability in the long run by a lot.
📚 Automating Repetitive Tasks Using VS Code Snippets
As developers, we write the same chunks of code again and again — whether it’s a React component, a PHP function, a JavaScript utility, or a WordPress loop.
Laravel
📚 Leveraging Laravel Actions for Cleaner, Reusable Code
Laravel Actions are a design pattern used to encapsulate specific units of work—such as creating a user, sending an email, or processing a queue—into individual, reusable classes.
📚 How Laravel Loads and Caches Translation Files in Localization
Localization is one of Laravel’s powerful features, allowing developers to support multiple languages seamlessly using either PHP array files or JSON files.
📚 Workflow of Laravel Eloquent ORM behind the scenes
Behind every Eloquent call, Laravel translates your methods into raw SQL using a layered structure of classes.
📚 Laravel Actions and Services
Honestly, organizing business logic in Laravel sometimes feels like herding cats. Controllers, jobs, events-everyone’s fighting for attention, and before you know it, you’ve got a mess that’s one step away from spaghetti code.
📚 Laravel Octane: 15 Advanced Configuration Techniques for Maximum Performance
We’ll dive deep into memory management, worker optimization, and advanced tuning parameters that most developers never explore.
📚 7 PHP Operators Every Laravel Pro Should Master
After years of writing nested checks and verbose conditionals, I discovered seven PHP operators that quietly revolutionized my Laravel code.
📚 Building a Modular ERP System with Laravel 10
In a recent project, I refactored a custom ERP system that had grown over two years. It was time to clean up the monolithic structure and prepare it for scale. Here’s how I redesigned the architecture using a modular approach with Laravel 10 and PHP 8.2.
📚 Redis Integration in Laravel: Advanced Techniques Beyond Simple Caching
This comprehensive guide covers practical implementations, performance tuning, and real-world use cases to maximize Redis’ potential in your Laravel applications.
📚 Fixing CORS Not Working in Laravel 12 (Custom Middleware Solution)
When working with Laravel 12 and building APIs consumed by frontend apps (like React, Vue, etc.), you might run into the dreaded CORS error — even when you think you’ve configured it correctly.
📚 Handle authorization in Filament: Policies, Roles & Guards
In this guide, we’ll explore how authorization works in Filament , how it integrates with Laravel policy system, and how you can control user access with clarity.
📚 Getting Started with Laravel API Resources for Clean JSON Responses In Laravel
Laravel API Resources provide a powerful and clean way to structure JSON responses in APIs.
This guide will break down fundamental tools in the Laravel developer’s toolkit, explaining what they are, when to use them, and providing a code example for each.
📚 The Laravel Idea Plugin is Now Free for PhpStorm Users
Starting July 30, 2025, we’re making Laravel Idea free for PhpStorm users. If you already have the Laravel Idea plugin installed, you get full access to all plugin features at no extra cost.
Laravel Live Denmark is back with its second edition of the conference, to be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21-22. August 2025.
📚 Laravel Health Checks: Monitor App State in 2025
Every Laravel developer has experienced that sinking feeling when users report that “the website is down” while your server monitoring shows everything is green.
📚 Stop Writing Try/Catch Like This in Laravel
Let’s strip out these toxic patterns and rebuild your error handling with clarity and resilience.
📚 Refactor Controller into Action Class: Cleaner & More Maintainable Laravel Code
In this article, we’ll walk through how to refactor your Laravel controller methods into dedicated Action Classes to achieve cleaner, modular, and more testable code.
Most of us relied on switch(…) for conditional logic—until PHP 8 introduced the match expression.
Symfony
Read the Symfony upgrade guide to learn more about upgrading Symfony and use the SymfonyInsight upgrade reports to detect the code you will need to change in your project.
📚 July 28 – August 3, 2025: A Week of Symfony #970
This week, Symfony released the maintenance versions 6.4.24, 7.2.9, and 7.3.2. Meanwhile, we began deprecating the XML configuration format in some components, enhanced the YAML configuration format to support auto-completion and updated the container XML dumping process to remove some dependencies.
📚 Understanding All the Ways to Define Routes in a Symfony PHP Project
In this article, we’ll walk through all the different ways you can define routes in a Symfony project, with simple examples and practical notes.