New features are constantly being added to Laravel. If a few days have passed since you first installed it, try running a composer update command from your terminal. You should see the latest versions of Laravel and its dependencies being downloaded. Since you are already in the terminal, finding out about the latest features is just one command away:

$ php artisan changes

This saves you from going online to find a change log or reading through a long history of commits on GitHub. It can also help you learn about features that you were not aware of. You can also find out which version of Laravel you are running by entering the following command:

$ php artisan --version
Laravel Framework version 5.0.16

All Artisan commands have to be run from your project's root directory.