Hello everyone, today I going to share some updates on Orchestra Platform. This is mainly for the community to know what going on behind the scene and what might come out in the near futures. Few things that I would like to cover today is regarding:

• Paid Subscriptions
• Community Projects
• Cookbook

This is our first time releasing Orchestra Platform major/minor release on the same day as Laravel. This release will be our biggest release yet and was originally planned to be due on the 15th of June 2015. However, since the changes to Laravel is still consider minor it should be safe to do it now.

What's New

I'm proud to announce Orchestra Platform 3.1 is packed with new features that I believe would be useful for your application development. As of now, we have roughly 28 components (instead of 17 components in previous release) available under Orchestra Platform.

On November 7th, Chris Smith (@chrismsnz) of Insomnia Security alerted the Laravel development team of a method of bypassing the CSRF verification in Laravel 4 applications.

From: Laravel Development Blog

To patch your applications, modify the default CSRF route filter in the app/filters.php file to the following:

Route::filter('csrf', 'Orchestra\Foundation\Filters\VerifyCsrfToken');

Note that the token comparison has been changed from a != comparison to a !== comparison. This will prevent specially crafted JSON requests from bypassing the filter.

You also need to update to orchestra/foundation version v2.1.14 or v2.2.8 to receive the security fixes for CSRF on the administration/backend interface.

If you are using the CSRF protection feature of Laravel/Orchestra Platform, it is recommended that you apply this patch immediately.

It has been a long overdue update and I'm terribly sorry for that. I hope even with my absent you still enjoy developing with Orchestra Platform as much as I did. Today I would like to share some update regarding Orchestra Platform mostly regarding the soon to be release 2.1 and some of the community project that I would like to start exploring.

Official Website

This official website has been moved from Jekyll to use Orchestra Platform (with Story CMS), this would allow us to create additional section including:

• Forum
• Website/application built with Orchestra Platform showcase.
• A aggregator of extension built for Orchestra Platform.
• Tutorials.
• Feel free to suggest what you'll like to see.

I would also like to mention that the website is hosted with DigitalOcean.

In this tutorial we'll look at how to build on the default features and behaviour of the Orchestra Platform by extending the user model. To achieve this we'll leverage the event-driven nature of Laravel.

The Orchestra Platform provides a basic schema definition for the user model, which you can see in the migration step below:

<?php
    /**
     * Excerpt from '/vendor/orchestra/auth/src/migrations/{$timestamp}_orchestra_auth_create_users_table.php'
     */
    Schema::create('users', function($table)
    {
        $table->increments('id');

        $table->string('email', 100);
        $table->string('password', 60);

        /* ..etc...*/

        $table->string('fullname', 100)->nullable();
        $table->integer('status')->nullable();

        $table->timestamps();
        $table->softDeletes();

        $table->unique('email');
    });

A few days ago Aaron Lee e-mail me with a problem that he is experiencing with Orchestra Platform and I see that this is a common painfall that any extension developer would experience while developing for Orchestra Platform.

Hi,

Let me just say that i love Orchestra. However, I'm facing a bit of trouble. I tried to set up a new extension, but if i make a mistake and I activate the extension, Im getting a ton of error.

Most of the time i had to reinstall the database. Thats very troublesome.

It's been awhile since I was able to really come up with a good tutorial for Orchestra Platform due to personal commitment (hint: I currently looking for a job). Behind the scene Orchestra Platform has been actively improved and patched. With only less than 2 month orchestra/foundation is now on v2.0.12.

There would be time when your web-server user doesn't have the required permission to publish asset (mostly on shared hosting). Orchestra Platform 2 has bundled a FTP publishing support specifically for this purpose.