&w=3840&q=80)
Agiledrop has been heavily involved in the PHP ecosystem ever since our earliest days. We’ve been especially focused on the Drupal community, with event organization and sponsorships, code contribution, interviews with community members, free Drupal courses, and other initiatives.
As a result, we’ve also always been involved with Symfony as a core part of Drupal, in addition to plain old PHP, with meetups, webinars, and even an interview with one of our former team members who was a release manager for PHP 7.4, as well as a very prolific PHP contributor. We’ve also hosted a WordPress meetup, and I personally contributed heavily in the first-ever online WordCamp Europe that took place in the early months of the Covid pandemic.
In recent years, however, we’ve become more and more invested in the amazing Laravel community, even making it our core technology alongside Drupal, and one we often recommend to clients looking for a powerful framework to start out with, upgrade to, or just incorporate it into their existing – and now optimized – tech stack.
Let’s break down our diverse involvement with the Laravel community over the past few years.
Official Laravel Partners
As an official Laravel Partner, we’ve provided invaluable support to busy Laravel teams with our experienced developers, and helped renowned clients build highly performant, scalable and secure business-critical applications.
Certified Laravel Company
In addition, we also have a Certification for Laravel, and are proficient in making the best use of Laravel's advanced application & robust e-commerce platform development, API integration, and pairing it seamlessly with JavaScript-powered frontends, with expertise ranging from Angular to Next.js and Nuxt.js.
Our CEO is on the Board of Advisors of the Certification for Laravel
Our CEO and co-founder Iztok Smolic is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Community driven Certification for Laravel, an affordable program for different levels of developer experience, under the guidance of the board together with the Exam Committee.
Conference sponsorships
The full-on return of in-face events after Covid neatly coincided with our amping up our involvement with Laravel. In 2023, we sponsored our first Laravel Conference, LaravelLive UK, which we then also sponsored in 2024 along with our first Laracon EU – and this year we’re sponsoring LaravelLive UK, Laracon EU, as well as our first Laracon US.
Event organization
Besides these event sponsorships, we’ve also hosted several dedicated Laravel meetups in our Agiledrop headquarters, with amazing attendance for such a specific community. The first of these (which, coincidentally, took place almost exactly two years ago) was actually the first official Laravel-specific meetup in our local community!
We had the comfiest T-shirts available for all attendees, and I even have a personal funny story related to that event: that same summer, I was at a music festival abroad, wearing my Agiledrop hat, and one of the people I met there through some mutual friends was looking at me, and eventually said “Hey, I was at your Laravel meetup! It was really awesome!” 😄
Filament sponsors
We also sponsor the accelerated Laravel development framework Filament, helping fund new features and bug fixes, and offering community support. Our developers also frequently suggest Filament as an optimal solution to clients that need advanced admin panels in their Laravel apps.
Interviews with community members
Just like we’ve done with Drupal, WordPress and even Angular, we’ve also done a few interviews with prominent names in the Laravel Community, i.e. Freek Van der Herten, developer and co-owner of Spatie, as well as one of the organizers of the Full Stack Europe conference; and Caleb Porzio, the well-known creator of Laravel Livewire and Alpine.js who gave us an exclusive look into the origins of these two now widely popular frameworks.
Streamlined Laravel onboarding program
In addition to our well established Drupal onboarding program, we’ve recently also created and streamlined onboarding for Laravel developers, as well as any of our Drupal or PHP-focused developers who want to learn Laravel in order to better serve their particular client’s needs.
In closing
Even though we’re relatively new to supporting and investing heavily in the Laravel community, we’ve successfully proved our high-level proficiency and commitment to this great project. Not only is Laravel a powerful and widely used technology, it’s the amazing and loving community that truly makes it shine, and we’re proud to have become a part of it.
The results and feedback speak for themselves, but we of course plan to continue – no, expand – our involvement, with even more community support and more frequent educational content. Stay tuned – and hopefully we’ll meet at the next Laracon!
