How to manually create a new empty Eloquent Collection in Laravel 4
As of Laravel 5. I use the global function collect()
$collection = collect([]); // initialize an empty array [] inside to start empty collection
this syntax is very clean and you can also add offsets if you don't want the numeric index, like so:
$collection->offsetSet('foo', $foo_data); // similar to add function but with
$collection->offsetSet('bar', $bar_data); // an assigned index
It's not really Eloquent, to add an Eloquent model to your collection you have some options:
In Laravel 5 you can benefit from a helper
$c = collect(new Post);
or
$c = collect();
$c->add(new Post);
OLD Laravel 4 ANSWER
$c = new \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection;
And then you can
$c->add(new Post);
Or you could use make:
$c = Collection::make(new Post);