MailEclipse: Laravel Mail Editor Package

 

MailEclipse is a mailable editor package for your Laravel applications to create and manage mailables using a web UI. You can use this package to develop mailables without using the command line, and edit templates associated with mailables using a WYSIWYG editor, among other features.

You can even edit your markdown mailable templates:

When creating a mailable template, you can pick from existing themes provided by this package:

The best way to get an idea of what this package does is to install it and try it out or check out this five-minute demo from the author:

Note: the video doesn’t provide sound, but does give an excellent overview and demo of MailEclipse features.

At the time of writing this package is a work in progress and under active development. Part of being under active development means that if you’re interested, you’re encouraged to try this package out and provide feedback.

To start using this package, check out the source code and readme at Qoraiche/laravel-mail-editor on GitHub.

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Laravel Blade Filters Package

 

Blade Filters is a package by Gergo D. Nagy that adds the concept of filters to your blade templates. If you’re familiar with Django’s templating system or Symfony’s Twig templating language, the concept of a filter looks like this:

{{ 'john' | ucfirst }} // John

Alternatively, you could write the same thing like this in Blade without the concept of filters:

{{ ucfirst('john') }}

Chained usage is where I personally feel filters begin to shine over function calls:

{{ 'john' | ucfirst | substr:0,1 }} // J

{{ substr(ucfirst('john'), 0, 1) }}

More usefully, here’s how you’d use filters with a template variable:

{{ $currentUser->name | ucfirst | substr:0,1 }}

Finally, this package provides filters that leverage built-in Laravel APIs:

{{ 'This is a title' | slug }} // this-is-a-title

{{ 'This is a title' | title }} // This Is A Title

{{ 'foo_bar' | studly }} // FooBar

To learn more about this package—including installation instructions—check out the source code on GitHub at thepinecode/blade-filters. Also, the package author Gergo wrote a detailed article that explains how to build a custom ViewServiceProvider that you should check out!

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Eloquent Cloner Package

Cloner is a trait for Laravel Eloquent models that lets you clone a model, and it’s relationships, including files. Even to another database.

Here’s a basic example of a model using the Cloneable trait:

class Article extends Eloquent
{
    use \Bkwld\Cloner\Cloneable;
}

Here’s how you can clone a model instance, even to another database:

$clone = Article::first()->duplicate();

// Cloned to another database by connection name
$clone = Article::first()->duplicateTo('production');

A more advanced example includes defining which relationships cloned along with the model:

class Article extends Eloquent
{
    use \Bkwld\Cloner\Cloneable;

    protected $cloneable_relations = ['photos', 'authors'];

    public function photos() {
        return $this->hasMany('Photo');
    }

    public function authors() {
        return $this->belongsToMany('Author');
    }
}

Check out the documentation for full details on how you can also define how to clone files attached to a model. You can learn more about this app and check out the source code on GitHub at BKWLD/cloner.

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Laravel Search String

 

Laravel Search String is a package by Loris Leiva that generates database queries based on one unique string using a simple and customizable syntax.

Laravel Search String provides a simple solution for scoping your database queries using a human-readable and customizable syntax. It will transform a simple string into a powerful query builder.

Here’s a nice visual example of what this all means taken from the project’s readme:

Here’s a brief code example that is taken from the readme using the search string and the equivalent query builder:

Article::usingSearchString('title:"My blog article" or not published sort:-created_at');

// Equivalent to:
Article::where('title', 'My blog article')
       ->orWhere('published', false)
       ->orderBy('created_at', 'desc');

Check out the documentation for full details on the extensive search syntax and all the customizations you can make. You can learn more about this package and check out the source code on GitHub at lorisleiva/laravel-search-string.

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Laravel Custom Casts Package

 

The Laravel Custom Casts package by Vladimir Ković enables you to make your own custom cast types in Eloquent models:

Laravel custom casts works similarly to Laravel attribute casting, but with our custom defined logic (in separated class). Beside casting to our complex types, this package gives us the ability to listen and react to underlying model events.

Here’s an example model utilizing a custom cast class:

namespace App;

use App\CustomCasts\NameCast;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Vkovic\LaravelCustomCasts\HasCustomCasts;

class User extends Model
{
    use HasCustomCasts;

    protected $casts = [
        'is_admin' => boolean // <-- Laravel default cast type
        'name' => NameCast::class // <-- Our custom cast class (follow section below)
    ];
}

With the above model in mind, here’s an example of the custom cast class:

namespace App\CustomCasts;

use Vkovic\LaravelCustomCasts\CustomCastBase;

class NameCast extends CustomCastBase
{
    public function setAttribute($value)
    {
        return ucwords($value);
    }

    public function castAttribute($value)
    {
        return $this->getTitle() . ' ' . $value;
    }

    protected function getTitle()
    {
        return ['Mr.', 'Mrs.', 'Ms.', 'Miss'][rand(0, 3)];
    }
}

The $value in the setAttribute() method is the raw database value we want to store. This package also enables you to handle model events and react to those events.

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub at vkovic/laravel-custom-casts.

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