I'm fairly new to web development and I have only published one website before. With that website I only used some PHP and without framework. Now, I'm planning on using the laravel framework for my next, bigger, website. I'm wondering if there are differences between publishing a website when using a PHP framework? If so, what are the major differences and where can I read about it (googling has not helped me)?
You have countless options. Here are some I am aware of:
Basically, you could just publish your site/app by FTP'ing it up to your server. The biggest issue will be the Database-changes. Here, the main influence is, whether are you able to run migrations or not? You would at least have to have ssh-access to your server with the required prerequisites installed. Otherwise, you would need to keep track of the changes in some other way, and change the db manually (which is not an good option IMO).
There are server-deployment automation-tools, the one i know is capistrano. You can write scripts which do the deployment. These tools are also capable of running migrations, if you tell them to do so, but you would need to have ssh-access for that. Google will tell you the rest, here is a good tutorial.
If you use SCM for your "bigger project" (which i would highly recommend), you could use push-to deploy technologies. This approarch basically uses Git-Hooks for triggering deployment-scripts. Deeployer could take care of that for you, if you do not want to develop your push-to-deploy-solution from scratch. Other alternatives are Rocketeer (Open Source) or DeployHQ (Paid)
Services like laravel-forge or envoyer offer zero-downtime automated deployments. I guess they are also based on push to deploy anyway. If you want to learn more about them, i recommend watching the corresponding laracasts-series (Forge, Envoyer). Be aware that they are not free.
I hope this overview gets you started. Happy deploying!
There is no difference between publishing a plain PHP website and one with a framework. Simple FTP up all your files and it will work, just remember to upload the framework files also.