First up on our journey is the new models directory and namespace.

Those of us with long-running Laravel applications are well-aware of how massive the migrations folder can get. The Laracasts codebase, itself, has well over 100 migrations that must run every time I refresh the database. As part of Laravel 8, you can now squash these down into a schema file.

In Laravel 8, all generated models include a new HasFactory trait. In this episode, we'll review the new class factories as well as how to execute them.

Before we move on, let's dig a bit more into the new model factory generation. In this episode, we'll review relationships and the has magic method.

Laravel 8 ships with improved maintenance-mode functionality. You can now pre-render templates and specify a secret key to effectively "whitelist" any users you share it with.

If you enjoy using the traditional Event::listen() syntax for registering event listeners, you'll be happy to hear that the syntax is now a bit cleaner. In this episode, we'll review a basic registration example, while also taking a look at the new queueable() function.

The new Wormhole class allows for Carbon-based time-traveling. This can be useful in testing situations where you need to setup a world where Carbon::now() returns a specific date and time that you specify.

Laravel 8 ships with an improved API for declaring rate limits on a per-key basis. In this episode, we'll review the differences between the Laravel 7 and 8 approaches.

Jetstream is Laravel's brand new application scaffolding package that replaces Laravel UI. It includes authentication and registration, profiles, two-form authentication, teams, Livewire and Inertia stacks, and so much more.