The Unchained Developer- Free Your Workflow and Become Device Agnostic

May 4, 2020

Back in 2011, I was getting frustrated with my aging development machine. It could barely keep up with me, though I resisted getting a new machine because it can be so frustratingly time-consuming to set up a new machine. As I pondered what to do a thought struck me, “you are a WEB developer Ben….

How to Force SSL (HTTPS) in Laravel

March 10, 2020

Out of the box, Laravel will allow both HTTPS and HTTP requests to your website or application. Ideally all requests are served via SSL. There are several ways to accomplish this, some of which require access to server configs. I am going to show you how you can easily force SSL in your Laravel application

Add a Mailchimp email subscription form in Laravel – double opt in!

March 8, 2020

With several fantastic extension out there, integrating a Mailchimp email subscription form in Laravel has never been easier! I am going to show you an example integration that collects an email address in a simple form. We will be using the laravel-newsletter package by spatie. Assumptions You have a Laravel application already running You have a

How to use custom pivot tables in Laravel 6.x

November 18, 2019

Have you run into this before? Your app’s database table structure is predefined and unalterable. There are lookup tables (called pivot table in Laravel) that create many to many relationships between tables using YOUR naming convention. It makes sense in the context of your application, but you quickly find out that Laravel’s relationship defaults do

How to fix a WordPress HTTPS redirect loop with an NGINX reverse proxy

September 16, 2019

If your WordPress site is set up to use HTTPS and a reverse proxy, such as an NGINX reverse proxy, is put in front of it you may wind up with an infinite redirect loop. Following the redirect in dev tools, it looks like this is happening: https://example.com -> https://example.com A head scratcher for sure,