Making development mistakes is nothing to be ashamed about. It happens to the best of us. But some mistakes are common and easily avoidable.
If you can learn what those are, and avoid them, then you can not only cut down on your development time but also become a better developer.
Laravel is becoming more and more common. And so many new developers are learning it and building sites with it.
Laravel is a powerful PHP framework that offers developers a wide range of features and tools to create web applications.
Laravel is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework, meaning it helps you to organize your code into different parts. The Model layer is responsible for dealing with the data, the View layer is responsible for displaying the data, and the Controller layer is responsible for handling the user input.
Laravel also offers a wide range of features, such as routing, authentication, database abstraction, and object-relational mapping. These features make Laravel a great choice for web application development.
So this post is intended for those young Laravel developers who want to improve their skills by learning what not to do. It’s okay to make your own mistakes, but it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid making them yourself.
Here’s a list of the eight common mistakes that Laravel developers make:
1. Ignoring Errors in the Code
When you see an error in your code, you should fix it right away.
You might be able to keep your site functional even with some errors in the Laravel site’s code, but it can affect other portions of your site. Plus, not fixing errors can have a compounding effect and lead to a crash of your site altogether.
So while developing with Laravel, don’t make the mistake of ignoring an error. Use the php.ini file and redirect your errors to a mistake log. It might seem time-consuming at the moment, but it always pays off later.
Leaving errors in the code also affects the performance of the website – and no one wants that.
2. Not Setting up the Configuration the Right Way
Proper configuration can protect your site from hackers and also makes it easy to perform the job it’s made for. Not setting up the right configuration will have the opposite effect.
Unfortunately, some developers fail to set up the dev.php file. That can mess up the configuration between servers, databases and networking systems.
So if you’re working with Laravel, learn about configuration from the start as it is a foundation step in your development process. If you can get this right, the rest of the project will be off to a good start.
3. Not Taking Full Advantage of Laravel Security Packages
If you’re a Laravel developer with decent experience, then you must know what cross-site scripting (XXS) is. And you must also know how dangerous it can be if a hacker gets their malware on your site.
The Laravel security packages exist to prevent just that. Yet some developers fail to use it properly and leave their sites vulnerable to hacks and cross-site scripting attacks.
This mistake can cost you a lot in terms of user and client data.
So whenever you’re developing a Laravel project, make sure that you go through the features of the security packages and perfectly integrate them into your website. Don’t ever forget to add the CSRF hidden field token to your code.
4. Not Updating on Time
Most Laravel developers know the importance of updating the framework on time. It can be too complicated sometimes, but it’s necessary.
A common mistake programmers make is putting off the updating until the project is in shambles. If you don’t know how to do it or if you’re worried you’ll mess it up, then hire a Laravel development company. But don’t make the grave error of failing to update your Laravel project.
5. Missing Critical Development Steps
Documentation, testing, wireframing, checking source code, removing development variables, getting the code reviewed, running your code to check if everything works as intended are only some of the critical development steps that you can’t miss while working with Laravel – ever.
You’ll risk the performance of your project and you could end up having to redo the entire code.
New developers are often in a hurry to meet deadlines or are overconfident about their programming abilities. Due to that, they tend to skip some development steps that they deem not as important.
You can’t make that mistake if you are committed to developing an excellent Laravel site. Always make sure that you’ve completed all the required steps before you move on to the next stage of development.
6. Leaving Your API Exposed
APIs are not that tough to handle. But some developers tend to mess it up as well. Amongst the many mistakes that you can make with APIs in Laravel, the biggest has to be leaving your API exposed.
For instance, if your API used file_get_contents and you accidentally leave it exposed, then you risk making your user list public.
Anyone can then edit the file path of uploaded data or download anything from your server – without you ever figuring out who it was who did it because you won’t have a system to track them.
So always remember to integrate your APIs the right way and secure them before sending off the project for launch.
7. Using Laravel, but Not Using Laravel
Do you know why so many developers use Laravel? It’s because of the dozens of amazing features that are unique to this framework. Yet one of the biggest mistakes new developers make is not using these features.
So they use Laravel, but they don’t actually use it at all. They don’t leverage caching, jobs, mail, queues, eloquent, and console commands. So they might as well be using just any other PHP framework.
8. Not Using the Feature of Migration
Some developers try to cut corners and avoid migrating data. Instead, they create a new database or add new fields. This is a mistake because it offers only a short term solution to a long-term issue.
Migration allows you to easily share the schema of the database. Although you can do that even when you add new fields, migrating is a better approach if you have a lot of files and too much information to manage.
The Takeaway
Laravel is an excellent framework for developing robust apps and responsive websites & aims to make the development process a delightful experience for the developer without sacrificing application functionality. Happy developers make the best code. To this end, we’ve attempted to combine the very best of what we have seen in other web frameworks, including frameworks written in other languages, such as Ruby on Rails, ASP.NET MVC, and Sinatra.
If you can avoid the common mistakes people make, then this framework can offer you many more features than some of the other common PHP frameworks.
Learning and relearning is a part of the developing world. If you plan on being a big-time programmer, then you should get used to it.
Every new version of Laravel comes with its own new set of mistakes and errors that developers can make. After reading this article, we hope that you can avoid some of the common mistakes so that you can keep developing amazing projects.
