I'm using Laravel for a year now and really love it. I'm using it for my job and now, a year passed and 100% of the projects I'm doing are now built on Laravel. As I'm doing a couple of sites a year, I'm always trying to improve my workflow. Especially when starting a new project.

I use Yeoman a lot (Bower + Grunt + Yo for scaffolding) and I've managed to use it even with laravel projects. The only problem (well this is not really a problem because I already have a solution) is related to starting a new project.

I have made a Yeoman generator to create the skeleton of a new project (https://github.com/Folkloreatelier/yeoman-generator-laravel). Basically what I'm doing is fetching the laravel repository from github, then I fetch a repository on my github (https://github.com/Folkloreatelier/yeoman-boilerplate-laravel) with some base files that are commons to all my projects (javascript, base css, ...) and also some files that will overwrite the laravel files (in the app folder) with my tweaks (configuration, filters, base routes, ...). And finally, I fetch another repository similar to the other if the website contains an administration sections (https://github.com/Folkloreatelier/yeoman-boilerplate-laravel-admin). This repository contains also commons files (js, css, ...) and also overwrites laravel files in the app/ folder to pre-configure some things.

This works fine. But I can't stop asking myself if this would be better to move all this in packages. I could have a packages for the commons files I'm using, a package for my base administration section, and packages for some other functionalities. The major reason why I think it could be better that way is to upgrade an existing website with a newer versions of, for example, my administration panel. The reasons why I'm not already doing this is I can't figure how to use packages and still be able to customize the website for it's specific needs.

The most concrete example I can think of to explain my concerns is: if I make a package for my administration panel that contains a basic sections to manage users. I know that in 80% of the projects, it will be the same form to create or edit the users. But if for a project I want to add a field for the cellphone number. Doing it the packages way, will require me to find a way to by pass the form view contained in my package, the controller method to save and validate the new field, etc... because I cannot directly edit the files in the vendor folder. While doing it like i'm doing right now, only requires me to edit that view in my app/views/admin/ folder and the controller in app/controllers

So my question is for people who are using Laravel in a production context. How do you deal with that? What is your workflow when you start a new project? How do you reuse your configuration/functionnalities/structure you develop overtime?

Thanks