Using Laravel 4

I've updated the blog to use Laravel 4. Laravel 4 is currently in beta development, a complete rewrite of the PHP framework to use Composer to be more modular and interoperable.

Currently I'm not doing things the best way as my Git knowledge isn't up to scratch. I followed the instructions on the Laravel docs page. I also installed Composer system-wide by putting the phar file in /usr/local/bin. Thus all I need to do is go into my Laravel directory and run composer update and all the components are updated to the latest version; including any extra packages I've added to the composer.json file myself.

I find this incredibly exciting. It's simply a case of going to http://packagist.com/ and going I like the sound of that, all I have to do is add one line to one file and I can use it. For example, I'm using Markdown in my posts, so I use this package by dflydev. Admittedly it's not as simple as just adding a line to the composer.json file. Due to how packages are loaded, anywhere I want to use the file I need to add the line

use dflydev\\markdown\\MarkdownExtraParser

Though I am sure there are better ways of doing this. I believe this can be done by editing the providers and aliases arrays in app/config/app.php, but I'm yet to look into this properly.

I'm also doing a basic redesign of the site, focusing slightly on the layout, but mainly the colour-scheme, incorporating the Solarized colour palette. Maybe even a little SASS/LESS magic to switch between dark/light schemes.