There's an article specifically about the release here:<p><a href="https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/" rel="nofollow">https://laravel-news.com/2015/02/laravel-5-released/</a><p>It might be a better way to get an overview of this release as it links to various other articles about v5.<p>An article specifically on the changes:<p><a href="https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/" rel="nofollow">https://laravel-news.com/2015/01/laravel-5/</a>
After using Laravel 4 for an internal company tool I have a hard time recommending it (sadly, I was hopeful). I found the docs to be uneven in quality/scope, some key features (mostly around the ORM) missing and the 'feel' to be slightly off.<p>It's hard to quantify, but I have used CakePHP, Yii, Rails (0.9 through 4), Django and plenty of home-grown 'frameworks'. From all those the most cohesive and understandable to me was Rails followed by Yii (surprisingly).<p>Maybe it's the docs or structure, but Rails and Yii have a strong opinion and it seems their developers have both CS smarts and industry experience, which shows in the structure and code.<p>I'm sure in time Laravel will mature and improve. Currently it just feels like there's a lot more hype than it merits.
If you're new to Laravel or want to learn more check out <a href="http://Laracasts.com" rel="nofollow">http://Laracasts.com</a>. Jeff Way does a great job. (Just a fan/current subscriber).
Laravel represents what modern PHP can do and be. Clean, organised, fully object-oriented. Kudos to what Taylor Otwell has created both from a marketing perspective and technical standpoint.
Having watched Laravel 5 throughout development, I'm personally unhappy with the fact that most of the nice features of Laravel have been removed.<p>For example, the default version of Laravel 4.x shipped with the "Whoops" PHP stack trace view, which is far superior to the L5-default Symfony stack trace view. Other features were removed too, including the HTML library. Blade tags were changed for no reason.<p>Overall, it feels like instead of adding requested features, Taylor decided to redesign the architecture for no reason.
I really like Laravel, it makes getting things started easier. I am glad I finally have a good way to manage my assets from within Laravel so that I don't have to deal with all of that myself every time. The only thing I find Laravel lacking is Web Socket support and every time I tried to implement something I would basically give up and switch to Node.js. Is there anything that can get web sockets working in Laravel?
I love the `Architecture Foundations` section in documentation [1]. I wonder why more frameworks don't do this. It happens a lot that I have no idea where to put files when I start with some frameworks. I am still not sure how good it is but I am reading through it right now.<p>[1] <a href="http://laravel.com/docs/master/providers" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com/docs/master/providers</a>
I tend to use Laravel when the client/project forces me to use PHP rather than Rails. It's not bad when coming from the Rails world.<p>I also have a bit of pride that it's made in Arkansas. Yes, we have computers and the internet here.
Laracasts has a series of introductory screencasts on Laravel 5: <a href="https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals" rel="nofollow">https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals</a>
For those currently using Laravel, here are some upgrade guides due to the large changes from 4 -> 5<p><a href="http://laravel.com/docs/master/upgrade" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com/docs/master/upgrade</a><p><a href="http://mattstauffer.co/blog/upgrading-from-laravel-4-to-laravel-5" rel="nofollow">http://mattstauffer.co/blog/upgrading-from-laravel-4-to-lara...</a>
Looks like some links are broken.
For example <a href="http://laravel.com/docs/authentication" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com/docs/authentication</a> redirects to -> <a href="http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/authentication" rel="nofollow">http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/authentication</a> which is 404.
Deal-breakers for me with Laravel:<p>- Blade templating language. I don't need yet another templating syntax to learn, especially one that isn't analogous to others I know and are common among other frameworks.<p>- I really can't imagine going back to an active record based ORM. I've learned too many hard performance lessons from Doctrine1 and rails at this point.<p>- Facade/proxy pattern based classes. I think as they are implemented in the actual framework, these are done correctly. However, I think the userland understanding of this pattern is often lacking and leads to a lot of glorified singletons that are some how touted as acceptable because they call them facade/proxy based.<p>In the giant lineup of frameworks, ranging from something as simple as SlimPHP or silex, all the way to enterprise targeted frameworks like Zend Framework 2, I just don't see why I'd ever pick Laravel as the go-to solution in any use case.
Ive been so excited about this! Though I kinda miss the call to action buttons that they had on the old site. Scrolled down the page looking for the quickstart button before I had a "duh" moment and clicked on documentation.