it would be worth for sure to use L5 for future projects.

I'm not familiar with L3 since i started with L4 shortly before L5 became standard and there had been quite some changes between those two already. So i guess it would be quite some work to move a project from L3 to L5. If it's worth to rewrite your program to L5 is hard to say. Also depends on what your plans are with the program. You want/have to add more and more features to it or is it final? In the latter case, i'd stay with it.

Learning L5 will take its time but since you are already familiar with Laravel it won't be that long. And meanwhile there are quite some tutorials out there. I would strongly suggest Laracast videos of Jeffrey Way. Extremely helpful. eg

https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-5-fundamentals

Thanks for the reply!

The feature set isn't final at all, which is why I'm considering moving at all. There are dozens of features I have yet to code for the project. I have been checking out some of Laracasts' videos, and also trawling through the documentation, but I'm still a little torn.

Well, hard to decide for other people, not knowing your project and its complexity.

But esp. if you are developing it further i think it will be a beificial to use L5 over L3

It involves quite some work at the very beginning but it'll pay on the long run

If you don't mind the time investment and switching out X number of bundles then Yes it is worth it.

However, keep in mind that L4 and even more so for L5 you're possibly looking at learning a lot of "design patterns" and possibly adding layers that you might not really need for your current app.

L3 isn't a dead framework but obviously you're out of the loop and any new topics for L3 are pretty much non-existent.

Remember that there is always trade offs for this decision and does those decisio make sense for you and your app?

I'm the kind of person that loves moving forward and willing to take a hit in productivity while catching up to speed.

http://laravel.io/forum/01-31-2014-how-to-mark-up-forum-posts>illuminate3 said:

However, keep in mind that L4 and even more so for L5 you're possibly looking at learning a lot of "design patterns" and possibly adding layers that you might not really need for your current app.

Yeah! I'm exactly at this point right now, haha. I'm getting lots of jargon and articles about design patterns thrown at me. While I see how these design patterns would be beneficial in truly separating business logic from being dependant on your presentation layer, I don't see the purpose of using hexagonal architecture or DDD unless the application is going to be quite large and accessed from different mediums. Am I missing something here? More importantly, do I have to use these new design patterns with L5, or am I able to stick with MVC with maybe a service/helpers layer added?

A lot of laravel 5, of I'm not mistaken, is to make life easier for "big apps" with testing in mind.

However, laravel is still laravrl meaning that you can make it as smart or as dumb as you want.

My code is not as advanced as Jeffery Way's or many other other really good programmers so I add design patterns as I see fit. Laravel still allows me to even keep some L3 code around.

So, yes. You should be able to still do what you like doing with your code. And when you're ready move on to those higher level concepts.

Just be prepared that lots of people will suggest to move to those concepts. They are right but they also tend to forget that your app tells you when it's ready. Jeffery has lately also started saying this is his newer series.