What is Laravel? It's a popular PHP framework similar to CakePHP or CodeIgniter. It offers all of the standard MVC capabilities and provides features targeted specifically at designers. In this course, Joseph Lowery shows you how to install Laravel and Composer—its dependencies manager—and start creating pages with Laravel's powerful syntax and flexible HTML views. He'll also show how to use the Blade templating system, which will be a big help in the next chapter, when you build your first Laravel app—a user authentication app. Last, you'll check your app and see how Laravel code holds up in testing.