Hey there,

Form and Html builders are still available here: https://github.com/LaravelCollective/html

It's been decided by Taylor (the Laravel maintainer) that they won't be included in a default install because he's like to focus on the core aspects of the framework. The Form/Html builder can be seen as an extension which can easily be required through Composer. I agree at some point that it might be overhead on some sort of projects to include it by default. Take an API service or CLI toolkit for example. A Form/Html component absolutely makes no sense for these sorts of applications so it would be of no use to include them by default.

I agree that a reference to the new package would be nice in Laravel's docs. If you want them included in the docs, please don't hesitate to send in a pull request here: https://github.com/laravel/docs

@driesvints, Thanks for your note. I currently am using the helpers by including them in composer from the source you mentioned. But I was trying to reason that there ideally should be no reason to do that.

With all due respect, Form/HTML is a CORE feature. I do not agree that it is potentially an overhead if not used in the project. Again, the idea should be to make Laravel appealing and inviting to new adopters, failing which, the userbase will not grow (I presume this is still one of the main goals of Laravel). No newcomer to PHP/MVC is going to be dabbling with API's or SPA's (or even json). All that comes only after one becomes very comfortable with the framework. One of the main reasons for Laravel's popularity is that it offered a better alternative to Codeigniter while maintaining its simplicity (and ALL the features). The helpers are a great feature and have an awesome syntax to boot.

I'm afraid Laravel is treading into the "overengineered" framework clubs (such as ZF, Symfony) thereby increasing the barrier to entry.

I know this topic has been broached several times in this forum as well as Laracasts, and there are several people on both sides of the fence. Through this note, I'm hoping I can impress upon the maintainers that HTML & form helpers absolutely belong in the core framework.

That's all I have to say about this topic :-)