I am happy to announce the immediate release of a new project that my friend (@stidges) and I have been working on for the past 3 weeks:

http://www.laravel-tricks.com

UPDATE: You can also get the source of the website here: maxoffsky.com/maxoffsky-blog/announcing-release-laravel-tricks-com-source/

Laravel-tricks.com is a website that features tips and tricks on using Laravel framework that developers discover when they are working on projects that use the Laravel PHP framework.

History

About 3 weeks ago I was browsing people on Twitter in search of partnerships, and found @stidges‘s profile to contain a lot of mentions of Laravel and good design skills. I have contacted him immediately telling him about the idea I had for Laravel community to have a centralized website for collecting useful tips and tricks for Laravel users. @stidges is amazing with design (seriously, the guy can go from an idea to working HTML in minutes) and his knowledge of Laravel is superb (I have learned a lot from his code refactoring. So after talking and working with him on the project for less than 3 weeks him and I have built an amazing product that you get to use now, Laravel-tricks.com.

Purpose

The idea is that when you find out something cool while using the framework, you could post it on Laravel-tricks.com for everybody to use and for the common good of Laravel community. You can also search existing tricks by category, tag or keywords.

Here’s an example of how the tricks look like:

I have built an editor for the tricks using Cloud 9 ACE editor that I use on all of my sites that feature any sort of code editing. Also using Selectize.js for the tagging and categorizing functionality (you have to be registered to try out the editor):

Some stats from the launch:

After @stidges and I launched the website we immediately got some warm feedback from the Laravel community and even a retweet from Laravel account,

http://t.co/igRagb3O2T is now live! Check out tips and tricks for the @laravelphp framework and RT! — Laravel Tricks (@LaravelTricks) December 4, 2013



lots of tweets and retweets about it lead to having 1000 unique visitors on the site in the first 12 hours:

Technical data:

I take very simplistic approach when building new sites to finish them quickly, often relying on third party frameworks and plugins to achieve the release in very short terms. Laravel-tricks.com is using the following technologies behind the scenes:

Customized Bootstrap 3 HTML/CSS framework

Laravel PHP framework (version 4.1!) which is incredibly fast and accelerated development a lot

Cloud 9 ACE editor for the code editing

Jquery FileAPI plugin for user avatar uploads and cropping

PHP 5.4, MySQL Database

Pagodabox hosting

Enjoy using Laravel-tricks.com!

UPDATE: You can also get the source of the website here: maxoffsky.com/maxoffsky-blog/announcing-release-laravel-tricks-com-source/