Symfony Station Communique - 29 October 2021. A Look at Symfony and PHP News.

This post originally appeared on Symfony Station.

Welcome to this week's Symfony Station Communique. It’s your weekly review of the most valuable and essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities.

Thanks to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our last communique in their Week of Symfony.

*Please note all links will open in a new browser window. My opinions, if I present any, will be in italics.

Symfony

This week

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> “This week, Symfony development activity focused on adding auto-completion features to some of the built-in commands. Meanwhile, the Symfony Docs website was redesigned to give it a modern and more useful look. Lastly, we announced nine additional speakers for the upcoming SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition conference (December 9-10, 2021).”

A Week of Symfony #773 (18-24 October, 2021)

Five new companies have joined the Symfony Sponsoring Program to help make the Symfony project development sustainable.

New Backers for the Symfony Sponsoring Program

Symfony also announced the third set of speakers for the next SymfonyWorld. I am looking forward to The New Testing Landscape: Panther, Foundry & More from Ryan Weaver.

Third Round of Selected Speakers at SymfonyWorld 2021 Online 2021 Winter Conference

Via SymfonyCasts: Our Symfony 5 refreshed Doctrine relations tutorial is complete! In this last chapter, we celebrate by doing something unrelated to relations: adding & customizing Pagerfanta pagination links.
And now time for something completely different! The Symfony 5 security tutorial - which is ALL about the new "authenticator" system: passports, badges, listeners, throttling... and 100 other cool things.

This week on SymfonyCasts

Wouter Carabain, who is providing some useful info on his new blog, began a new series of posts looking at pairing Symfony with API Platform. Here’s the first one.

How to create a simple application using Symfony and React Native – Part 1

Last Week

Rector posits this hypothetical situation: a new major Symfony is released in December 2021. We'll already have PHP 8.1 out by that time. There have been a lot of positive vibes about new PHP versions in the last year, so let's say the framework takes a brave leap forward.

Symfony 6 will require PHP 8.1 as a minimal version in its composer.json.

How would you react to such a move? What if you could keep using your current PHP version while using Symfony 6?

How all Frameworks can Bump to PHP 8.1 and You can Keep Using Older PHP

Dariusz Włodarczyk discusses how to authenticate user roles and permissions with a Vue.js and Symfony-based project.
Vue.js and Symfony: Roles Authentication

Anders Björkland is posting a series of articles looking at Bolt CMS from 3 different perspectives: content creators/editors, designers, and developers. He starts with Content Creators.

A "Not WordPress"-CMS based on Symfony

While I did not use it, Bolt was one of the three CMS finalists for the permanent version of the Symfony Station website. Currently, we are putting the finishing touches on it.

Timeless

Anders also had this interesting article from back in April.

Deploying a Symfony application with Deployer

PHP

This week

smknstd provides a useful modern php cheat sheet on GitHub.
Modern PHP Cheat Sheet

According to Travis Weston, a private Packagist account can be too expensive for freelancers or small companies. Why not host your own for free?

How to host your own private Packagist for free (or extremely cheap)

Compression is a vital and effective way to increase the performance of web pages and web apps. PHP.Watch shows us how in this post.

Compressed HTTP Requests with Curl and PHP

They also have this article about using Sodium for encryption.

Modern PHP data Encryption/Decryption with Sodium extension

Our friends from an alternative PHP framework have this short article on their official blog.

Enforce the Disposal of Object in PHP

In PhpStorm’s latest blog post, you can read about how Inline method, Inline variable, and Extract variable will be improved in the upcoming release.

PhpStorm 2021.3 EAP #5: Improved Refactorings

Brent of stitcher.it has been thinking about attributes vs annotations. After months of thoughts and discussions, He’s come to a conclusion: they are worth giving a try, albeit with some side notes attached.

The case for route attributes

Les Tilleuls Coop provides a review of Forum PHP Paris. In French.

Retour sur le Forum PHP 2021 (partie 1)

Alexandre Daubois looks at what he calls “hidden features” in PHP, even if everything’s in the documentation. Several of these were new to me.

Bet you’ll learn at least one new PHP feature in this article?

Last Week

Noor Ali looks at memcached and how it speeds up websites having large dynamic databases by storing database objects in Dynamic Memory to reduce the pressure on a server whenever an external data source requests a read.

Using Memcached with PHP

Drush is a command-line shell and Unix scripting interface for performing various administration and development tasks with Drupal websites. The name is a portmanteau of “Drupal Shell.”

Popular CLI tool renovated: what’s new in Drush 9 & 10

Last Month

Strivemindz has some good advice for how to approach enterprise-level applications.

Tips for Building Large-scale Applications in PHP

Other

I am a Slack user but this is a great look at it and Discord from one of my favorite’s, the Kinsta Blog.

Slack vs Discord: Which Chat App Is Better for Your Team?

This was surprising to me considering GitHub’s Copilot has not been in use for very long.

Nearly a third of new code on GitHub is written with AI help

Speaking of GitHub, their blog added this post about security and compliance.

GitHub Actions for security and compliance

Venture Beat published this insightful opinion piece on the lean approach to development.

Why lean is the only viable development approach in a post-COVID world

The latest edition of the Docker Index is in, and it shows a continued growth in activity across the Docker community.

Docker Index Shows Momentum in Developer Community Activity

Have you published something related to Symfony or PHP that we missed? If so please contact us.

That's it for this week. I look forward to sharing next week's Symfony and PHP news with you on Friday.

Please share this post. :)

Happy coding Symfonistas!

Reuben Walker
Founder Symfony Station
Reuben is also Ringmaster of Mobile Atom Media and its division Mobile Atom Code.