Since writing this post, TypeScript has become officially supported in Laravel Mix (version 0.12 and up). There’s still some informative stuff in here if you’re new to TypeScript, but use the official method if you’re on a newer version of Mix!

In a recent Spatie project we decided to give TypeScript a shot for the business critical part of a new application. TypeScript provides static analysis to reduce the chance of introducing bugs, to have self-documenting code, and to improve our tooling (autocompletion!)

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When admins create or update a news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it’s title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. If we wouldn’t regenerate the url on updates, edited titles would still have an old slug in the url, which isn’t an ideal situation either.

Our solution: add a unique identifier to the url that will never change, while keeping the slug intact. This creates links that are both readable and unbreakable.

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When building a website for a client that wants to be able to manage content, Laravel’s language files aren’t ideal since you can’t edit them without diving into a bundle of text files. We recently decided to drop all the lang files in our custom CMS in favor of persisting translations in the database, which allows us to build a custom interface for managing them.

This post is a quick overview on overwriting Laravel’s default translation loader, which means you can keep using the lang method while fetching the translations from a database. Writing a custom loader is easier than it sounds. First we’ll set up our translation models, then we’ll write our loader, and finally register it in our application.

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