I’ve hand-picked some of the biggest stories at Laravel News in 2023. This year was jam-packed with content, conferences, packages, tutorials, videos, and podcasts. We’ve seen some fantastic Laravel packages enter the ecosystem in Prompts, Pulse, Livewire v3, and more!

Let’s take a look at the highlights of each month in 2023:

In January, we saw the Release of Inertia v1.0, which included a simplified project structure, first-class Typescript support for React and Vue, SSR support for Svelte, SSR server in the core library, and more.

February was arguably the hottest month for Laravel in 2023, with the major Laravel 10 release on February 14th, 2023!

Laravel 10 included some excellent additions to the framework, including:

Native type declarations in the Laravel 10 skeleton
The Process component for running CLI commands
Laravel Pennant
Invokable validation rules become the default
Test profiling
New String password helper
and more…

In March, we saw the release of PEST 2.0, a testing framework that focuses on simplicity. This release introduced Architecture Testing and a bunch of helpful features:

Speed improvements using the –parallel testing flag
The –profile option to identify slow tests and optimize their execution
A minimal printer for test output with the –compact option
A –dirty option to run only failed tests
A –bail option to terminate the test suite on an error or failure
and more…

April had some stand-out Laravel 10.x releases, with Laravel 10.7, Laravel 10.8, and Laravel 10.9.

Laravel 10.7 introduced the pipe() method to the new Process layer, which allows you to do something like the following:
Building in the pipe() method, Laravel 10.8 added some syntactic sugar to the pipe() method:
Laravel 10.8 also introduced class-based “after” validation rules, which allows an array of “after” rules, for example:
Laravel 10.9 added named static methods for middleware, which provides an alternative “PHPish” way to define route middleware:

In May, Dries Vints introduced his work on the Lemon Squeezy package for Laravel to easily create checkouts and manage subscriptions, trial periods, webhooks, and more. The announcement in May was followed by the release of Lemon Squeezy for Laravel 1.0, but we’re counting it for May when the initial package was announced 🙂

The Laravel Tailwind Merge package allows you to merge multiple Tailwind CSS classes and automatically resolves conflicts. This package is a PHP port of the tailwind-merge package for JavaScript.

July was the first Laracon since before the 2020 pandemic, and it did not disappoint! We saw Pest’s “Spicy Summer” release, Laravel prompts, Laravel Volt and Folio, Laravel Livewire 3, Laravel Herd, Native PHP, Laravel Precognition updates, and a sneak peek of the upcoming Laravel 11 application skeleton.

Our Laracon Recap is an excellent way to summarize everything Laracon US 2023.

Related: Learn Livewire 3, Volt, and Folio by building a podcast player

If you thought Laravel might slow down after the outpouring of packages and features from Laracon US 2023, August 2023 proved otherwise. So many things were going on post-Laracon US, but we highlighted Filament v3’s launch for August.

We also saw the release of Laravel Prompts in Laravel 10.17, a Class-based API in Laravel Volt, and built-in support for Laravel Pint in PhpStorm.