Laravel Removed The QuickStart For Version 5

To start out, I want to be clear that what follows should not be interpreted to be a criticism of the software framework that those that work on Laravel publish, nor an indictment of open-source software as a whole. Rather, it is a look at how some projects, open or closed source make it harder than it should be for new users/developers to utilize their terrific products.

It seems experts conveniently “forget” the tips and tricks and tribulations it takes to learn a new technology, covering it all with, “It’s just so easy”.

Working with Magento and its quirks as a development platform has led me to seek out more elegant PHP MVC frameworks. Amazingly enough, the one that keeps piquing my interest has been Laravel. I first began to look at it when it was version 4.x, so I haven’t been watching its progress for that long. One of the things that drew me to Laravel was its simple and easy to understand quickstart that was part of the documentation through version 4.2. It quickly walked you through the major tasks you would need to complete to get a new Laravel project up and running. As a developer, I find this type of documentation invaluable when evaluating a new platform, as it helps to indicate the preferred way of doing things for the platform.

However, when Laravel version 5 was released, I was disappointed to discover that there was no quickstart available in the updated documentation. Instead of finding a very basic listing of how to setup a sample project in Laravel, the documentation simply provided an outline of how each component worked, failing to include the piece about how everything works together. While I was able to figure things out, it probably took more time than it should have to do so, and some may not figure it out at all, instead moving on to a project that has documenation that is a bit more user-friendly.