Leonie Derendorp

Webdeveloper and co-owner of PLint-sites in Sittard, The Netherlands. I love to create complex webapplications using Laravel!

About Leonie Derendorp

Webdeveloper and co-owner of PLint-sites in Sittard, The Netherlands. I love to create complex webapplications using Laravel!

Handling cron jobs in Laravel

Posted in Development on April 14, 2021

Setting up cron jobs is easy in Laravel, since it has a build-in task scheduler. One of the main advantages of this task scheduler is that you only have to set one cron job on your server. Once this is done, everything will be handled by Laravel. In this blog we describe how to handle cron jobs in Laravel.

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Deploying a Laravel application using Forge and Envoyer

Posted in Development on March 31, 2021

We love to build web applications using the Laravel framework and deploying those applications is obviously a necessary step. Although we have some knowledge about server management, we aren’t fond of maintaining and configuring servers. Luckily, Laravel Forge and Envoyer exist to help us. With Laravel Forge, it’s easy to manage servers. A new website is online in no time, cron jobs and queues are easily set up and even a more advanced setup using a network of servers and load balancers can be configured. With Envoyer, we manage deployments. In this post, we will describe the setup and tools we use.

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Using WordPress for web development

Posted in Development on March 11, 2021

When we started PLint-sites in 2013, we used WordPress for almost every website and application we built. It was easy to use and with a relatively small effort, it was possible to make a nice website. Nowadays, we develop applications using Laravel and Vue, but WordPress remains a beautiful CMS for web development. In this post, we like to share our experience with some aspects of developing websites using WordPress.

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A scalable server setup using Laravel Forge and Envoyer

Posted in PHP on March 13, 2020

New projects often start small and a single server taking care of everything is just fine. However, as successful applications grow in time, a more scalable setup may be required. In such a setup you use dedicated servers for the application itself, database, caching and queues and use a load balancer to divide traffic between the application servers. Each server can then be optimized for its own needs.

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Using WordPress as API for Laravel (2) – Connecting Laravel to WordPress

Posted in PHP on May 8, 2019

This is the second post on using the WordPress as API for a Laravel application. We describe how to setup the authentication, so that Laravel can retrieve the posts and pages created in WordPress. We use this setup in a project that was originally created in WordPress. It already had a lot of content, and also for new posts WordPress was the prefered choice, because of its great features to manage posts, revisions, comments and images. At the same time, Laravel is our prefered choice to build the custom features of the project, because of its great flexibility.

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Running queues for multiple applications on the same server with Laravel Horizon

Posted in Development on April 3, 2019

Queues are an essential part of modern web applications. By handling long running processes as background tasks, apps become much faster and your users get a better experience. Examples are sending emails, processing file uploads and generating documents. With Laravel Horizon it’s easy to manage queues. Setting up horizon is easy. However, I ran into some issues when I tried to run Horizon for multiple apps on the same server. In this post I’ll describe how to fix them.

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Using WordPress as API for Laravel (1) – WordPress setup

Posted in PHP on February 28, 2019

Nowadays, we mainly build custom websites, webshops and web apps using Laravel. Many of those websites have info pages or blog posts where the administrators want to be in charge of the content. How do we achieve this? We tried different wysiwyg editors, but it turned out that the functionality was too limited. Then we started thinking about WordPress, our framework of choice in the past. It has a great admin panel for maintaining content pages or a blog.

In this post we discuss how to use WordPress as a headless CMS and combine it with the flexibility of Laravel to build custom websites and web apps.

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How to quickly improve website performance

Posted in Development on December 12, 2018

Nowadays, websites should be fast, otherwise visitors will leave your website before they have seen the most important content of your website. It’s obvious, but it can be quite a challenge with all the interesting (frontend) assets that make your website so great once it’s fully loaded. In this post, I’ll describe some quick wins to improve the performance of your website.

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How to create a good design as a developer

Posted in Development on October 8, 2018

I’m a developer, not a designer. But my customers expect the web applications, online platforms, websites and administrative panels I build for them to look at least ‘fine’. For big projects I usually work together with real designers, but in smaller projects there isn’t always a design budget. Still our applications should look nice and our customers should be happy to work with them.

In this post, I will describe the design guidelines I use for the most important aspects of a layout: grid, fonts, margins and colors. Then I will apply them to an app that was recently developed by my colleague.

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