10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should Use

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel is a very popular and easy to use PHP
  framework which allows you to quickly build
  applications by providing a solid foundation of
  tools such as RESTful routing, built-in ORM,
  templating and much more.
• This means that you spend less time building the
  boilerplate of your application and giving you
  more time on writing your web application.
• Weve listed below 10 essential Laravel 4
  packages which make it easier to get common
  functionality in your Laravel web application
  without having to implement it yourself.
• This means that you dont have to spend a lot of
  time on common parts of a web application such as
  authentication, debugging, site optimization,
  etc.
• This list is in order of popularity, based on the
  number of downloads from Packagist.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel Generators
• One of the more common things that you do when
  writing a web application is building new models,
  views, controllers and other modules.
• The manual work involved in doing these becomes a
  bit tedious.
• With these Laravel generators, youll be able to
  increase your productivity by simplifying that
  process into a few PHP Artisan commands.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel IDE Helper
• The Laravel IDE Helper package generates a file
  for your IDE so that it can provide you with
  accurate complementation.
• The generation is done by using the files inside
  your project so they are always up-to-date.
• Alternately, you can use a pre-generated helper
  file however it may not be up to date.
• This helps reduce the number of documentation
  lookups when writing your web application.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Behat
• In very simple terms, Behat is a PHP framework
  that facilitates the process of testing your
  Laravel application.
• It allows you to use the process of
  behaviour-driven development within your Laravel
  application, making it easy to write behavioral
  tests for your application.
• This is very useful if you want to follow a BDD
  pattern and if you find yourself more productive
  using that pattern.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Ardent
• Ardent provides self-validating smart models for
  the built-in Eloquent ORM of Laravel.
• In easier terms to understand, it allows you to
  define validation rules inside the models which
  removes the need to have them inside your views.
• Your views become much smaller and the long list
  of validation rules are defined in the model
  file, where they should belong.
• With this, you can easily define your models and
  not worry about a large amount of validation in
  your views.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel Debug Bar
• The PHP Debug bar project is a huge success in
  making debugging of application much easier so
  that you no longer have to put var_dump() everywhe
  re in your code.
• The Laravel Debug Bar project extends the debug
  bar to include all sorts of other information
  regarding routes, views, events and much more.
• This makes debugging a faster and easier process,
  allowing you to be more productive.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Confide
• In almost all web applications, there is some
  sort of basic authentication which involves
  registration, login, logout, password resets,
  etc.
• The process of writing all this code takes time,
  can possibly lead to security problems if not
  properly implemented and uses up useful time
  which can be dedicated to writing your
  application.
• With Confide, you get all the basic
  authentication features you need without writing
  a line of code.
• More time writing your web application, less time
  writing boilerplate.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Entrust
• The second most popular web application feature
  is role-based permissions.
• Many times, youll find the need to allow users
  of a specific role to access a feature.
• An example of this is having both Administrator
  and User roles inside of a web application. 
• Entrust allows you to do all this without writing
  a full RBAC system.
• All you need to do is define a few roles and
  filter routes based on them.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Former
• Forms are everywhere in web applications.
• If you have any type of user interaction inside
  your application, it usually involves forms.
• However, they eventually become a pain to
  maintain. 
• Former makes it much easier to define forms
  within PHP and render them automatically using
  your favourite CSS frameworks such as Bootstrap
  or Foundation.
• This makes maintaining your forms much easier and
  makes getting them done much faster.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel HTML Minify
• One of the simplest and easiest ways to reduce
  your page size is by minifying your HTML source
  code.
• The Laravel HTML Minify package allows you to get
  a reduction of up to 18 of the file size without
  doing any changes at all except adding a provider
  in your application.
• This is such a tiny and small amount of work
  which results in a fairly significant improvement
  in performance.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• Laravel Administrator
• An administrative interface is almost a
  requirement for any web application.
• The basis of administrative interfaces is
  typically very simple however its an extra
  amount of work to do that is quite repetitive. 
• Laravel Administrator provides you with an easy
  to use administration interface which allows you
  to focus on building your web application and not
  on the back-end management of your website.

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10 Essential Laravel 4 Packages Everyone Should
Use

• More Packages
• There is an abundance of packages to help you
  accomplish whatever task that you need to do
  within Laravel, we could never put them all
  together, however, a few other useful ones to
  mention in here are
• In conclusion, youll almost always find a
  package that solves the problem which youre
  looking for inside Laravel.
• Therefore, its extremely useful to do some
  research before starting to write code because
  someone most likely has already attempted to
  solve the problem which youre trying to
  accomplish.
• We hope to have covered the most essential
  packages however if we have missed any, feel free
  to let us know in the comments!