One of the powerfull features of Laravel are the eloquent relations. They make it easy to retrieve and store relevant information from a database without writing complex queries. In order to use the eloquent relations, one has to correctlty set up the database and define relations in the corresponding models. This blog post explains how to achieve this.

A common issue when building a webapplication is the case where you want to display variables in a different format than they are stored in your database. For example, dates are by default stored as yyyy-mm-dd, but in the Netherlands dates are written as dd-mm-yyyy. Or maybe you stored the names of your users in lowercase, but you would like to show them with a capital. For those kind of situations, the accessors and mutators of Laravel are of great use.