Laravel 5 is a PHP web framework that was released in February 2015. Some key new features in Laravel 5 include improved folder structure, use of DotEnv for environment variables, caching of routes and configuration, inclusion of the Symfony VarDumper component, more robust middleware system, explicit contracts, method injection in controllers, changes to Blade templating, and integration of the Flysystem library for cloud storage support. Laravel 5 also removed some features present in earlier versions like annotations for routing and models.