Notifications

Quick Introduction

Notifications is a single PHP idea you'll use in almost every backend project.

In this lesson you learn only notifications — not five topics at once. By the end you can write a small working example and explain it in an interview.

We connect each lesson to our course projects: Login System, Blog CMS, REST API, Inventory, Employee Management, and E-Commerce Backend.

Business Problem

You're building the Blog CMS. After a user signs in, you need notifications working correctly before storing data or showing a dashboard.

Without understanding Notifications, the team ships bugs: wrong totals, broken sessions, or type errors that only appear in production. This lesson fixes that with one clear pattern you can copy into your project today.

Core Concept

• Notifications is one focused idea — learn it before mixing with other PHP topics.
• Use it in PHP 8.3+ with declare(strict_types=1); at the top of every file.
• Our course project (Blog CMS) uses notifications in real handlers.
• Run small scripts with php file.php after each change — don't just read.
• Interviewers ask for a one-minute explanation plus a tiny code sample.

Syntax

Core syntax for Notifications. Every keyword below appears in production PHP — Laravel and Symfony use the same primitives under the hood.

declare(strict_types=1);

Keywords: declare · strict_types · namespace

Step-by-Step Example

Run this script locally. Change one value, run again, and watch what changes.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

namespace App\Notifications;

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Messages\MailMessage;
use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

final class OrderConfirmed extends Notification
{
    use Queueable;

    public function __construct(private readonly int $orderId) {}

    public function via(User $notifiable): array { return ['mail', 'database']; }

    public function toMail(User $notifiable): MailMessage
    {
        return (new MailMessage)
            ->subject('Order confirmed')
            ->line("Your order #{$this->orderId} is confirmed.");
    }
}

Line by line

1. — part of the notifications example; run the file to see the result.
2. declare(strict_types=1); — turns on strict type checking for this file.
3. namespace App\Notifications; — part of the notifications example; run the file to see the result.
4. use App\Models\User; — part of the notifications example; run the file to see the result.
5. use Illuminate\Bus\Queueable; — part of the notifications example; run the file to see the result.

Notifications OK

Real-World Example

In the Blog CMS, notifications appears in a single request handler — not spread across ten files. Keep the example small, test it with php, then paste the pattern into your project branch.

<?php
declare(strict_types=1);

// TODO: Notifications exercise for Blog CMS