!rant
I'm not the biggest web developer, but has anybody used Laravel and what do you think of it?

Only touched it once when fixing a website that had been abandoned by the previous developer.

Not bad but slightly circuitous.

I love it.

I believe that if you give it an honest try, you might also see very good things.

However, there might not be necessary to have a framework so complex, for small things

@fredrf What would you say its best use-case is? Trying to decide. Building a sort of blog for my shit but decidedly against a CMS like wordpress, and don't necessarily want to build from scratch.

Not really like Laravel. It's too opinionated for me, I guess.

For building a blog you could try Ghost or one of many static site generators out there -- Hugo seems like a good candidate to me.

Symfony

@Notebookdeviant for a blog it would be a great use-case.

Laracasts beguiner tutorial sets up a blog. You can follow it, I think most of it is for free.

Not a user but 2 friends of mine use it religiously

It depends in the project at hand.
But i really gotta say that they really follow there concept *write beautiful code*

It's not bad. There's a bit of a learning curve if you're not familiar with its concepts, but it's a real time saver if you're building a website from scratch.

Though, I prefer Twig over Blade for a template engine

Anyone wanna give a thousand-yard overview to further discussion? Not to familiar with it myself, otherwise I would.

@logicbomb421 Say you want to make a site. Instead of worrying about how objects will read from the database and how you'll put that data onto a page somewhere on your site, it helps organize that for you. You got objects with a bunch of properties that you need to constrain (this value must either be 1 or 0, this other one must be a date range between only x and y, etc), you can put those into your models easily without having to rigidly check for each one. Database migrations are very easy, routing to different sections is very simple, etc etc

Very versatile and tbh I think it brings PHP out of the shadows and makes it a menace to be reckoned with.
Use in conjunction with tech like PHP7, some AWS micro servers and a nice front end like Vue to get the best out of it.
I use it 90% of the time except when I need something small and then I might use lumen, it's younger brother.
Watch the laracasts, Taylor Otwell is amazing. He'll show you how to use it like a pro