Could someone enlighten me, from the perspective of a product manager, why October would be a good choice for new site development over just using regular Laravel? What are the primary ways that October improves the development process and what key features does it add? Thanks in advance.

It really depends what you want to do.

If you need cms functions such as static pages, or you want to use standard off the shelf plugins, and you just want to develop some additional bespoke functionality, then October is great. You can see more here.

If you want a full on application development framework without the constraints that a CMS inevitably brings then Laravel is great.

If you want to do everything yourself then PHP is great :-)

I'd say October is great even for complex app development. Components are extremely powerful, and plugin development is crazy-fast!

To answer your question a bit more specifically, the things I love the most are the Ajax Framework, and how all the basic CRUD stuff is just a yaml file away! Also being able to use Eloquent in a CMS is excellent ;)

Last updated 9 years ago

October completely fast tracks back-end development (the administrative facing site) which would need to be carried out by hand in Laravel. This is like comparing kit furniture from Ikea versus some power tools and a few planks of wood.

October itself is not visible to the user on the front-end (the public facing site) because it is built entirely custom, so it offers the same level of flexibility as Laravel. The major difference is October is more disciplined in its methodology and design patterns. This means you can hand over a site to any capable developer and they can readily identify the structure. A Laravel site can be built at the whim of the developer and most of the time no two Laravel sites are structurally the same. This can create problems if you need to find another developer and is the fundamental difference between a platform (October) and a framework (Laravel).

October stands on the shoulders of Laravel, so by that very definition you get more features from using it. Most of the feature benefits require a low-level explanation, but in general they are tailored to rapid development and code re-usability.

There is also a growing marketplace of plugins that can be leveraged when the requirement/solution stars align, this is akin to what you would find in Wordpress although it hasn't quite reached that level of maturity. There is also the possibility of monetizing any creations if that is the path you want to go down.

Overall October is a wise choice in terms of consistency, quality and performance. It does perhaps require the developer to approach it with an open mind =)