What’s new in Laravel 5.7.13

When we first looked at Laravel earlier this year we focused on the security features it possessed and why it was such a popular framework that top web design and development companies in Pune, like CodePlateau, use it. Laravel has just recently been updated to version 5.7.13. It’s the constant updates that Laravel receives that make it such a popular framework for web developers and web development companies to work with. In this blog, we’ll be looking at the whole host of changes that have been introduced with the latest update.

But before we do that let’s take a small look at the update cycle of Laravel

Laravel Update Cycle

Not many companies provide an update cyclefor their applications. You have to keep guessing and this is important todevelopers to understand how they’re going to move forward with their plans. Asper the release cycle updates provided by the company Laravel will receive 2major updates every year.

The first major update will be in June and the other normally by the end of the year. While the framework has been updated the previous versions will still be supported for up to 6 months and provided while the newer version receives bug fixes and minor updates.

It’s important for web development companies to know when they need to perform updates and when new versions will be available so they can plan around it. However, if you want to stay to developers the latest release information you could visit the following link:

Here are the changes that have been added to the new release of Laravel:

  1. Messaging Ability
    You can now add a variety of messages to your custom validation rule. Something that the previous versions or Laravel were surely missing.
  2. Empty
    The collection methods now have the ability to pick between whenEmpty /whenNotEmpty/unlessEmpty/unlessNotEmpty method
  3. Added Illuminate\Support\Collection::some method
  4. Added Illuminate\Cache\Repository::missing method
  5. Added Macroable trait to Illuminate\View\Factory
  6. Added support for UNION aggregate queries

Changed

  1. Updated AbstractPaginator::appends to handle null
  2. Added “guzzlehttp/guzzle”:“^6.3”, to composer.json
  3. Showed exception message on 403 error page when message is available
  4. Don’t run TransformsRequesttwice on ?query= parameters
  5. Added missing logging options to slack log driver
  6. Use cascade when truncating table in PostgreSQL
  7. Allowed pass absolute parameter in has valid signature request macro

Changed realization

Used Request::validate macro in Auth traits

Apart from the above changes Laravel version 5.7 known as project Nova has also introduced the following features

  • Authentication scaffolding now also contains an optional email verification process
  • Authorization gates and policies now have support for guest users to log on
  • Testing improvement for various consoles
  • Notifications that are localizable
  • Dump-server integration with Symfony

Laravel continues to be an outsider’s choice when it comes to web development framework; however, it is quickly building up a steady reputation for itself. Here are some startling statistics about Laravel use in India and abroad.

  • Laravel is the most popular framework for developing web application in India: This should come as no surprise since the PHP Framework itself is solidly built. It allows you to develop a whole lot of applications with simple coding. Along with India, Laravel is also a top contender in the USA, China, Spain and the UK among others.
  • Laravel is slowly but steadily taking customers away from its competitors. For instance It’s leaving behind competitors like RealTime and Web2py. However, it is still facing stiff competition from the likes of WebMatrix and Lasso. Webmatrix is one of the most popular PHP frameworks in use currently. Of a hundred websites in use, application for 46 of them have been built by WebMatrix while only 11 have been built using Laravel so there is still a lot of catching up to do.
  •  Business and Industry category use Laravel the most frequently because of the high level of security it offers and the simplicity in the build.
  • Arts and Entertainment make up the next largest category with 6% of all Laravel web apps used in the arts and entertainment industry.
  • While USA leads the race in the top usage statistics for Laravel, India is in the top 10 list ahead of Turkey, Indonesia, and the Netherlands

CodePlateau is one of the top web development companies in Pune India that uses Laravel to develop top notch web applications for our customers. We have some amazing work to show in our Portfolio section which highlights the great work we can and have achieved using Laravel. If you are interested in knowing more about Laravel or would like a web App developed for your website, get in touch with us today.

All You Need To Know About AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

Since we’re living in a world of short attention spans your consumers are looking for the fastest smoothest web browsing experience. With the advent of the smartphone more and more of the users browsing experience has moved to smartphones. Google recognized this and in 2015 made speed a ranking factor and again in December 2015 hinted at making mobile website loading speeds a ranking factor too. Web developers in Pune and around the world began experimenting with mobile-friendly versions of their website but it wasn’t good enough.
Kissmetrics data shows that pages that take longer than 3 seconds to load are more likely to be abandoned by up to 40% of the users. To battle, this problem Accelerated Mobile pages were introduced, and it was found that websites that were AMP-optimized showed a significant improvement in their rankings. In this blog, we’ll look at what AMP Pages are and how you can use CodePlateau’s world-renowned web development services to take advantage of them on your own website.

What Are Accelerated Mobile Pages?
It began when Google and Twitter joined forces to bring about a faster online experience to their users. It is an open source experience that helps design your web pages to make them faster and provide a better user experience. It’s a plugin that can help reduce your web page to the absolute essential basics to make it load quicker.

How To Optimize Your Web pages For AMP?

  • This is what most of your readers are here to find out. The solution, simple, download the AMP plugin from right within the WordPress plugins search or from the Github downloads. You will need to change a bit of code however and that’s where the excellent team of web developers from CodePlateau in Pune come in handy.
  • What we also suggest is that you create two different versions of your content pages. One can simply be a mobile-friendly version where you can have all your features and customizations while the AMP pages will be bare bones but provide a better online experience to the user. You don’t have to be worried about Google considering the pages as duplicate as they take into account the AMP version as long as your page has been validated online.
  • Use AMP URL’s to distinguish between the two.

So How Does The AMP Plugin Work?

Like we’ve mentioned before the AMP plugin strips your webpage to the absolute basic code required by smartphones to run smoothly. There are three parts to the AMP structure:
1) AMP HTML
2) AMP JS
3) AMP CDN

AMP pages don’t load regular Javascript, there is an AMP Javascript subset that you need to use. There are several other factors that you need to consider before using the AMP plugin on your page –

– Before you can roll out your AMP pages they need to be validated
– It is best to avoid custom fonts on your AMP pages as this may delay load time as these fonts have to be specially loaded every time
– You have to specify height and width for every image you share on your page if you want them to load correctly
– Videos need specially approved extensions to run on your AMP pages

You also need to be aware of the fact that AMP pages are built for quickness and readability. You might not even be able to enable the social sharing icons on your AMP pages as these are built using Javascript. CodePlateau’s web development team in Pune have found a workaround for this issue, get in touch with us for additional details.

5 Benefits Of Using AMP Pages For Your Website
While there are numerous benefits of using AMP pages for your website, we’ll be looking at the top 5. These are the factors that can really help enhance your site’s ranking and help you convert more sales.

1) Quicker Loading Speeds – The whole purpose of building AMP pages is to get an edge over your competition when it comes to the speed with which the content on your pages load. Users love a faster browsing experience as can be ascertained by the KissMetrics numbers.

Here are some more statistics to help convince you that you need AMP pages for your website

  • Every second your page delays in loading you are losing 9.4% of your pageviews
  • Conversion rate drops by 3.5% with every second added to your page load time
  • Bounce rate can go up by 8.3% for pages that take more than 3 seconds to load

In commercial terms, depending on your monthly traffic this could amount to a serious loss of site visitors, sales and more

2) Highlighted Results In Search – When it comes to SEO every advantage you can find is worth the time you spend getting it. Websites that rely heavily on their content for marketing were thrilled when AMP pages were introduced as it provided them with a green lightning symbol to display them as AMP pages. They also showed up higher in the search results. AMP pages have a higher click-through rate than their non-AMP counterparts.

3) Higher Listing In Search – Since speed is now one of the ranking factors on Google pages that load quicker tend to have a higher listing in search. This is especially true for AMP pages as not only do they have faster loading times as compared to non-AMP pages, they also have a better click-through rate. While Google may not necessarily be focusing on earning money using AMP pages it has helped them generate more revenue. A better user experience has led to more users pushing to use Google as their default browser. More clicks mean more money for Google.

4) Better Ad Support – Speaking of Google making money using AMP pages it has also helped content creators streamline the Ad’s on their sites. Since only custom AMP approved HTML works along with streamlined CSS code and almost no Javascript there are fewer distractions on your web page. Users can focus on the content and there is plenty of space for Ads. While you don’t want to clutter your pages with Ad’s less clutter makes it more convenient for people to click on Ad’s when they’re truly interested in them. AMP pages make the Ad’s stand out more effectively than the rest of the content on the page.

5) Simpler User Tracking – It’s not just that AMP pages provide the user with a better experience they also provide the content creator with more data to work with. Using Tag manager on their AMP pages provides Google webmasters with more information about their users. All the metrics you can find on Google Analytics are provided separately for AMP pages.

Conclusion
India is still in a very nascent stage when it comes to adopting AMP pages. If you want to get a head start on your competition you should start working on converting your pages to AMP as soon as possible. While setting up AMP pages on your website might seem easy there is some web development knowledge that you would need. Who better to help you out with your problem than Pune’s best Web Development company CodePlateau. If you’d like to get started on your project or need more information on the subject, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch today!

Changes in WordPress Update 4.9

WordPress Update was just released last month and we haven’t really discussed it yet. We have been going over the list of improvements it has published and we must say that we are delighted. The list of changes is long and was very necessary in my opinion so it is good to see these changes in WordPress. Since we do a lot of our Web Design and Web Development work on WordPress we were delighted to see the changes. The WordPress 4.9 update is called Tipton. WordPress normally names is updates based on famous Jazz musicians. This update is called Tipton in honour of Jazz musician, William Tipton.

Here are all the changes that have gone into update 4.9 “Tipton” of WordPress.

Sharing and Scheduling Draft Customization:

As a business if you want to know what a change to your websites layout would look like they would first have to be published. You would need to go to the live website to see what the changes really looked like. With the new updates, these customization can now be shared with the business owners. You can see how the customizations will affect your entire website and without having to publish them. This is of great advantage to web development professionals like our team at CodePlateau.

If you are coming out with some new product line the web pages designed can be schedule so that they go live just when you need them to. As a web design and development agency in Pune it saves us a lot of trouble of seeking approvals and having to redo minor fixes if the client is not happy with our design themes or is looking for something different. You can see the changes and approve them on the spot.

Work Protection:

As a web designing agency we take great pride in our work. We feel really annoyed when all our work in changed either by an error or by someone unknowingly working on something that has already been completed. The new update to WordPress allows us to protect or work with a security feature. If anyone is looking to make changes they will have to request permission from the person who has locked the project saving a lot of rework and back tracking.

Code Error Highlighter:

Even the best web developers can make mistakes sometimes. So when you spend hours working on a project only to find out that it isn’t working make you want to tear your hair out. What’s great about the new update is that they have installed a CodeMirror syntax checking editor which helps you find where you have gone wrong. It makes it that much easier to fix your errors and have your site up and running smoothly sooner than expected. It also includes other features such as Syntax highlighting and an autocomplete feature.

Widget Improvements:

Update 4.9 has gone a long way to improve on the widgets in WordPress. You now have a lot more flexibility when it comes to designing and placing your widgets on the final website. You now have more access to WordPress Widget Web development. This is big step forward from the widget functionality that was provided in WordPress 4.8.

Safety Aspects of WordPress Update 4.9:

WordPress has a lot of theme designers and plug-in designers that work constantly to improving the features of their plug-ins. WordPress has stressed on the safety aspects of websites being built on their site. They have added several prompts to website owners to update their themes and plug-ins. They also provide additional safety messages to ensure that you do not lose your work in the process.

CodePlateau loves working on WordPress. We have developed some really exciting websites on this platform alone. It gives us a lot of pleasure that these new features make it easier for us to do our job.  If you would like to avail of our WordPress web design and development services in Pune, get in touch with us. We even provide a free consultation and it could be the first step in a fruitful relationship. So pick up the phone and let’s get talking.