Add Approvals to Your Laravel Application

The Laravel Process Approval package adds a structured and efficient approval process to your Laravel applications. Automate requesting and receiving approvals for your application with this highly configurable package. It has advanced abilities, such as multiple approvers, that you can customize to build complex approval requirements.

Let's say that you need sign-off from multiple people on a purchase order, license, or document model:

As the CEO, you have the ability to sign and approve:

The approval process triggers various events you can use to customize application logic when a model is submitted, approved, rejected, and so on.

Package Features

• Intuitive Configuration - Effortlessly configure your approval workflows using Laravel's expressive syntax.
• Multiple Approval Steps - Define multi-step approval processes to suit your organization's needs.
• Role-Based Access - Assign approval roles to specific users or user groups, ensuring the right people are involved.
• Notification System - Stay informed with automatic notifications at each approval step.
• Comprehensive Audit Trail - Keep a record of every action taken during the approval process for compliance and transparency.
• Customizable Views - Tailor approval forms and views to match your application's design.

You can learn more about this package, get full installation instructions, and view the source code on GitHub.

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Category: Dev News

Hot Off the Press: New WordPress.com Themes for December 2024

Another month means another fresh batch of excellent themes for WordPress.com. Let’s look at some of the latest additions to the WordPress.com themes gallery, with great options for content creators, small businesses, event organizers, and personal sites. Preview each one below (and maybe try taking one for a spin).

CoachAva

• Designed for: Professional coaches
• Also great for: Consultants, thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings

With a clean, single-hued design, minimal photography, and approachable fonts, CoachAva is built for professional coaches looking to highlight their core offerings and showcase their expertise. 

Whether you’re a seasoned executive coach, a life coach, or a subject matter expert looking to sell digital or in-person services, CoachAva can help you establish trust with potential clients by putting your thought leadership front and center. Blocks make it easy to share blog posts, podcasts, and/or customer testimonials on your homepage. The flexible design makes it easy to define, package, and showcase your different offerings, connecting clients to the perfect programs.

Explore CoachAva

CastCore

• Best for: Podcasters
• Also great for: Bloggers, serial content creators, news sites with limited photography

Ideal for podcasters building their first site, Castcore features bold, attention-grabbing titles and a minimalist aesthetic that keeps your listeners focused on what matters most – your content. 

With a simple homepage design, this template makes it easy for listeners to scroll through your recent content to find the right episode. Castcore is a great option for podcasters who want to build their subscriber base. The Podcast Player block makes it super easy to create an embedded mini-player for your episodes: simply copy your podcast’s RSS URL to engage listeners right on your page. Choose a grey and black color combo for a classic design or go young and bold with bright yellow.

Explore CastCore

CoachBen

• Designed for: Professional coaches
• Also great for: Thought leaders, speakers, and content creators with paid course offerings

CoachBen’s dark theme with bright accents offers a bold and professional design that perfectly reflects a coach at the top of their game. Striking and to the point, this theme allows professional coaches to quickly articulate their value proposition and define their services. 

With pre-designed blocks for displaying company logos of past clients, a calendar of speaking events, and a blog subscription, there are plenty of ways to show potential clients your expertise and experience. When they’re ready to dig in, they can learn more about specific offerings on your courses page or reach out to schedule a call.

Explore CoachBen

GreenSeed

• Designed for: Flexible visual sites
• Also Great for: Brick and mortars, Restaurants, Personal care providers, Digital portfolios, visual artists, photographers

Greenseed is a beautifully simple, highly adaptable theme that makes it easy for businesses to take their brick-and-mortar brands online. Designed with full-site editing in mind, Greenseed can be customized to match any brand style, but its open spaces and bold visuals make it a particularly great choice for businesses looking to establish a streamlined online presence that embraces custom photography. 

This minimal, approachable layout gives your photos space to breathe while providing key business information like address, phone number, and store hours. Link to your reservations page or provide visitors with a contact form to make it easy for potential customers to make an appointment or plan a visit.

Explore Greenseed

Aether

• Designed for: Small jewelry or accessory brands
• Also great for: Eco-conscious consumer brands, wedding suppliers 

Like the jewelry and accessory brands it was built for, Aether embodies modern elegance. With delicate fonts and natural-toned color palettes, this product-focused template offers a tasteful design that allows artisan accessories and jewelry to truly sparkle. 

With social media integrations and the ability to highlight products on your homepage, Aether creates a flexible hub for your digital brand. You can allow your customers to purchase products directly through WordPress’s e-commerce plugins or you can link your website to an existing storefront. With Aether, you can be sure your customers will understand your brand’s commitment to quality and design.

Explore Aether

Miko

• Designed for: Personal professional website
• Also great for: Writer portfolios, speakers, brand consultants

With a bold split-page design and minimalist elements, Miko keeps your brand center stage. Best for individuals, creators, or service providers who want to make a lasting visual impact, this template allows visitors to navigate through all of the pages of your site on the left side without ever navigating away from the image and title anchored on the right. 

Featuring a variety of hyper-modern font options and cool color combos, Miko can lean sweet and delicate or bold and artistic, effortlessly complimenting a huge range of personal and professional website identities. Regardless of the style you choose, Miko is the perfect theme for anyone who wants to present themselves as a modern, polished professional with an eye for design.

Explore Miko

Conference

The best way to market your upcoming conference is with a sleek custom website. Conference is a flexible template that helps conference planners create a credible online presence. 

The Conference template can support both marketing and event logistics: You can highlight your speakers, sponsors, and conference news to draw in new attendees via the signup form. Once attendees register, the site acts as a home base for key information, providing pages for the conference location, daily schedules, and lists of attendees to help your participants connect in advance. Whether you are hosting a multi-day affair or an intimate workshop, Conference can scale to meet the needs of your event.

Explore Conference

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Ready to give your site a makeover? You can explore these themes by clicking the “Demo” button on each theme page. Whether you’re starting a coaching business or looking to improve your professional online presence, you might just find the perfect jumping-off point for your future website.

Most premium themes are available to use at no extra charge for customers on the Personal plan or above. You can explore all of our premium themes by navigating to the “Themes” page, which is under “Appearance” in the left-side menu of your WordPress.com dashboard, or by clicking the button below:

Explore all WordPress.com themes

Partner themes are third-party products that can be purchased for $99/year each on the Business or Commerce plans, so if you haven’t found what you’re looking for today, there are plenty of alternatives available.

Read more https://wordpress.com/blog/2024/12/04/hot-off-the-press-new-wordpress-com-themes-for-december-2024/

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Category: Dev News

Enhancing Data Processing with Laravel's transform() Method

When working with conditional data modifications in Laravel applications, the transform() helper provides an elegant solution. This powerful utility function enables selective data transformation while gracefully handling null values. Let's explore how this helper can streamline your data processing workflows.

Understanding transform()

The transform() helper accepts three parameters to process your data:

• A value for transformation
• A callback function for non-null values
• An optional default value for null cases

// Basic transformation
$result = transform('hello world', fn ($text) => strtoupper($text));
// Output: HELLO WORLD

// Handling null with default
$result = transform(null, fn ($value) => $value * 2, 'default');
// Output: 'default'

Real World Example of the transform() helper

Let's explore practical applications of transform() in a user profile system:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;

class ProfileController extends Controller
{
    public function formatUserData(User $user)
    {
        return [
            'profile' => transform($user->profile, function ($profile) {
                return [
                    'display_name' => transform(
                        $profile->name,
                        fn ($name) => ucwords(strtolower($name)),
                        'Anonymous User'
                    ),
                    'avatar' => transform(
                        $profile->avatar_url,
                        fn ($url) => asset($url),
                        '/images/default-avatar.png'
                    ),
                    'bio' => transform(
                        $profile->biography,
                        fn ($bio) => str_limit($bio, 160),
                        'No biography provided'
                    ),
                    'joined_date' => transform(
                        $profile->created_at,
                        fn ($date) => $date->format('F j, Y'),
                        'Recently'
                    )
                ];
            }, [
                'display_name' => 'Guest User',
                'avatar' => '/images/guest.png',
                'bio' => 'Welcome, guest!',
                'joined_date' => 'N/A'
            ])
        ];
    }
}

When working with configuration values:

<?php

namespace App\Services;

class CacheService
{
    public function getCacheTimeout()
    {
        return transform(
            config('cache.timeout'),
            fn ($timeout) => $timeout * 60,
            3600
        );
    }
}

The transform() helper shines when compared to traditional conditional statements:

// Traditional approach
$displayName = $user->name ? ucwords($user->name) : 'Guest';
// Using transform()
$displayName = transform($user->name, fn ($name) => ucwords($name), 'Guest');

This helper excels at making your code more readable and maintainable while handling data transformations and null cases elegantly.

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Category: Dev News

Get Xdebug Working With Docker and PHP 8.4 in One Minute

Xdebug has a history of having a steep setup learning curve. I am here to show you that setting up Xdebug doesn't have to be painful. In fact, I am confident that you can start using Xdebug with Docker in about a minute.

OK, maybe it will take some of you a few minutes :)

We will demonstrate the setup with Laravel, PHP 8.4 and Xdebug v3.4.0, the latest stable versions at the time of writing.

The gist of what we need to get Xdebug configured with a Docker image includes:

• A Dockerfile that installs the Xdebug module and configuration
• A compose.yaml file to start the container
• A supported editor or IDE you can use as an Xdebug client

Project Setup

In this post, we are going to use Apache to simplify the server setup; however, the Dockerfile code is identical to configuring Xdebug in a PHP-FPM image.

We will start by setting up a demo project if you want to follow along:

laravel new xdebug-demo --git --no-interaction
cd xdebug-demo
mkdir -p build/php/conf.d build/apache
touch compose.yaml \
build/Dockerfile \
build/php/conf.d/xdebug.ini \
    build/apache/vhost.conf

We created folders and files for our setup via the command line, but feel free to make them however you want. In addition to the typical Docker files, we created a vhost.conf file to configure the web root path to our application.

Docker Image Setup

Next, add the following to your build/Dockerfile file:

FROM php:8.4-apache as base

LABEL maintainer="Paul Redmond"

RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo_mysql opcache && \
    a2enmod rewrite negotiation

COPY build/apache/vhost.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

FROM base as development

RUN cp $PHP_INI_DIR/php.ini-development $PHP_INI_DIR/php.ini

COPY build/php/conf.d/xdebug.ini $PHP_INI_DIR/conf.d/xdebug.ini

RUN pecl channel-update pecl.php.net && \
    pecl install xdebug-3.4.0 && \
    docker-php-ext-enable xdebug

FROM base as app

RUN cp $PHP_INI_DIR/php.ini-production $PHP_INI_DIR/php.ini
COPY . /srv/app

The Dockerfile has quite a few lines, so lets go over the most important code to help you grasp how to configure Xdebug. First, we use multi-stage builds so we can configure Xdebug in development environments. Before the development stage is the base stage, which has the foundational setup our image needs such as PHP extensions we want in any environment and configuring Apache.

Next the development stage copies the development version of the PHP.ini file, copies the xdebug.ini configuration that will hold our customizations we make to Xdebug. We use v3.4.0 which has support for PHP 8.4 and is the latest stable at the time of writing.

Last, we have a app stage, which is what our application image would use in production builds. Using the app target omits configuring Xdebug and uses the production version of the php.ini file.

Apache Vhost

We aren't here to learn how to configure Apache, we just want to use it to quickly demonstrate how easy it is to set up Xdebug in Docker. Just add the following code to the build/apache/vhost.conf file, which is copied into the Docker image to point to the application code:

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
 DocumentRoot /srv/app/public

 <Directory "/srv/app/public">
 AllowOverride all
 Require all granted
 </Directory>

 ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
 CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Xdebug Configuration

Next, we need to configure Xdebug via the xdebug.ini file we created. Add the following to this file if you are following along:

; build/php/conf.d/xdebug.ini file
[xdebug]
xdebug.mode = debug

xdebug.client_host = host.docker.internal

; Or use the host machine IP address:
; xdebug.client_host = 192.168.86.203

xdebug.start_with_request = yes

Our customizations are needed to define the client host. Since we are using a Docker network, Xdebug needs to know how to communicate with our host machine. If you are using Docker desktop, Docker has a host.docker.internal host that points to your host computer.

If not, you will need to find your computer's local network IP and use that. We could power this value with an environment variable, but I'll save that for a future post.

Last, we use xdebug.start_with_request = yes to always start Xdebug with every request. We can disable Xdebug using our editor's UI when we don't want to use Xdebug, but it will always attempt to establish a connection.

Running the Image

Before we verify an Xdebug connection, we need to configure our application container. We will use Docker compose to run our application with Docker by adding the following to compose.yaml:

services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: build/Dockerfile
      target: development
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    volumes:
      - .:/srv/app

Our app service targets the development stage of our build, mounts a volume so we can change our code without rebuilding the image, and uses port 8080 to serve the application locally.

We can now build and start our image using Docker Compose:

docker compose up --build -d

The previous command will build the image, start the container, and run it in the background. At this point, Xdebug is ready to receive connections, however, we need to tweak one thing in our IDE to get it working.

Configuring PhpStorm

We will use PhpStorm, but you can use any editor you want that supports Xdebug. Since we are using Docker, we need to configure a server in PhpStorm that maps our Docker volume to our local project code. You can do so by opening Settings > PHP > Servers and configuring a localhost server with a mapping of /srv/app:

If you don't have a localhost server, you can add one from this settings page using port 8080 and selecting the Xdebug debugger. The server mapping allows our IDE to understand how to map the server stack trace to files in the project.

Next, we are ready to enable Xdebug using the Bug icon near the top right menu that says "Start Listening for PHP Debug Connections" when you hover over it:

When you click it, you should see the icon turn green.

The last thing we need to do is set a breakpoint. Open up the routes/web.php file and set a breakpoint on the only line of the homepage route:

If you open your project in a web browser (localhost:8080), PhpStorm should prompt you to connect the first time. After that, it will automatically pause on any breakpoints you set. Once you are done debugging, you can click the bug icon to disable Xdebug connections.

Learn More

You should now be able to use Xdebug with your project! I also showed you a bonus topic - using multi-stage images to set up development tools and a separate stage for production settings. Using multi-stage builds can take your images to another level of flexability.

If you get stuck on the editor portion of setting up Xdebug, PhpStorm has extensive documentation on how to Configure Xdebug. Xdebug's documentation is another excellent reference, including docs on setup, tools, configuration options, and more.

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Category: Dev News