Laravel 4 – Junior Grossi

Working with Laravel 4 or 5 and WordPress together

Published on April 26, 2014.

Hi everybody!

Updated Mar 3rd 2015: Are you using Laravel 5? Check these changes!

Updated May 11th 2014: Using Corcel project

Currently I am working on a project where I had to make some choices about technologies and how work with them together. First this project will be developed using WordPress only. It’s a College Group site, where we had to work with 13 schools around the world and each one must has the control of your own content.

This could be made with WordPress, but I think when the site is not so small maybe you can use another CMS or Framework, because I particularly prefer to work with MVC. So because some decisions inside the company we decided to use WordPress Admin Panel, that is a very good, use its architecture and its database. So WordPress will be used to the application back-end, with user control, user permission, etc.

To the front-end we decided to work with Laravel. To query information from the WordPress database we’ve used the WordPress functions inside Laravel, so it’s much better to work with a MVC WordPress.

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Managing assets with Laravel 4

Published on November 4, 2013.

Generally assets are stored in your public directory, right? They are public, so anyone can get access to them. But nowadays the performance is a very important factor when deploying a new app. I strongly recommend you to minify and cache your assets, like CSS files, Javascript files and Images.

If you are using 11 javascript files in your app you don’t have to make 11 requests on the server, one per JS files. You can easily join all files and minify them, so you will have just one minified file. This is easy to do using Laravel 4! I’ve found four Laravel 4 assets managers:

codesleeve/asset-pipeline: My choice! It is easy to understand and to work with
jasonlewis/basset: Very good library created by Jason Lewis
teepluss/asset: Based on the Laravel 3 Asset class. It does not minify or join your files.
way/guard-laravel: A very good package but you must have Ruby installed

We will work with codesleeve/asset-pipeline package. It’s easy to use and simple to understand.

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Working with PHP 5.4+ built-in server with Laravel 4

Published on October 13, 2013.

One of the best improvements of the PHP 5.4 was the built-in web server. Like in Ruby On Rails, now you do not need Apache or Nginx inside your development machine.

To start a web server is easy:

php -S localhost:8000

Continue reading Working with PHP 5.4+ built-in server with Laravel 4