..but I would be lying if I didn’t admit to flirting with the sexy new framework going by the name of Laravel 4.

Laravel?

I first learnt of Laravel by reading articles published by Jeffrey Way in Web Designer magazine. It is a framework which takes advantage of the latest developments in PHP (such as Composer), and makes building sites more.. well.. fun!

This isn’t a post about explaining how great Laravel is however (I’ll let Jeffrey do that). Rather, this is a post, primarily aimed at myself, to list all the useful composer packages which I’ve found during my time learning the framework, and as I’m still learning the framework, as I find new and existing packages, I’ll try to keep this post updated accordingly.

Packages I’ve used

JeffreyWay/Laravel-4-Generators

This is the first of three packages created by Jeffrey Way which I’m going to recommend. It builds upon Artisan by adding a number code generation tasks to it. One of the things I liked about CakePHP (back in 2006) was it’s Bake feature – and this is the closest thing I’ve found to it in any framework (although, I have seen that Yii also offers something similar).

JeffreyWay/Laravel-Guard

I’ve been a fan of Guard since I discovered it’s ability to automate a large amount of your workflow simply by watching for file changes and acting accordingly, i.e. you can set it to automatically compile Sass files before livereload‘ing your screen. This package makes the process of configuring Guard for use with Laravel really simple.

JeffreyWay/Laravel-Test-Helpers

I don’t know much about Test Driven Development, but I’m currently learning how to do it (thanks, once again, to Jeffrey Way), and I know enough to make me want to use the technique for everything I build. This package helps simplify the process by offering a number of shortcut methods for the tasks you’re most  likely to do.

barryvdh/laravel-ide-helper

Although I’ve been trying to get into the flow of using Sublime Text 2 for coding, I keep reverting back to PHPStorm for a number of it’s features, one of which being code autocompletion. The problem I’ve found, however, Laravel’s facades paradigm prevents this from working out of the box. This package seeks to rectify this problem by creating  a docblock helper file which the IDE can take cues from.

Packages I’ve not used… yet

• onigoetz/profiler – adds a profiler bar to your in-development site with lots of useful information.
  
• fzaninotto/Faker – generates fake data for seeding your database with.
• cartalyst/sentry - fully-featured authentication & authorization system.
• Anahkiasen/rocketeer - provides a fast and easy way to deploy your Laravel projects.
• Intervention/image - PHP Image handling and manipulation class.
• FrozenNode/Laravel-Administrator - administrative interface package.
• Anahkiasen/former - automatic form markup for your favorite CSS framework (Bootstrap, Foundation).

…and more can be found at the Laravel Packages Registry (thanks Luke).

(Featured image by rafdesign)