Need help with Drupal or Grav admin, site building, design, or content? Contact us! 

Help Defend Democracy! → Join Battalion today.

Back to top with progress scrollbar

Symfony Station Communiqué - 03 March 2023

By Reuben Walker, 3 March, 2023

Illustration of a spaceship on the rocky surface of an alien planet.

Welcome to this week's Symfony Station Communiqué. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world and the Fediverse.

Please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you. There are a plethora of Drupal and PHP items.

Thanks to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our latest communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold.


A significant proportion of the content we curate is on Medium. I highly recommend investing in a membership to access all the articles you want to read. It's a small investment that can boost your career. As you may have noticed, non-members can only access a limited number of articles per month.

Become a member here! The compensation we receive from your use of this link helps pay for our weekly communiqué.


Symfony

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony. Highlight -> “This week, the upcoming Symfony 6.3 version experienced an intense development activity to finish many new features such as: adding a remember me option for JSON logins, allowing to trim parameters in XML config files, introducing a new Exclude attribute, allowing to define the batch size in Messenger component and allowing to extend the Autowire attribute.“

A Week of Symfony #843 (20-26 February 2023)

Symfony announced:

SymfonyOnline June 2023 - Submit you paper until March 6th!

Blackfire has:

Blackfire, a complete observability solution


Featured Item

The brilliant writer, Cory Doctorow explains why large corporate platforms suck:

“online platform businesses have a distinctly more abusive and sinister character. To a one, they follow the “enshittification” pattern: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Why are digital businesses more prone to this conduct than their brick-and-mortar cousins? One answer is tech exceptionalism: namely, that tech founders are evil wizards, uniquely evil and uniquely brilliant and thus able to pull off breathtakingly wicked acts of sorcery that keep us all in their thrall.

There’s another, simpler explanation for the enshittification of platform economics. Rather than trusting the self-serving narratives of the Prodigal Techbros who claim to have superhuman powers but promise that they have stopped using them for evil, we can adopt a more plausible worldview: that tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.”

Twiddler


This Week

Anton Lytvynov has two good items:

Symfony 6 and PHP 8: A Promising Future for Web Application Development

Creating Custom Web Applications with Symfony 6 and Php 8: A Step-by-Step Guide

Symfony vs. Other Web Frameworks: A Comprehensive Comparison

There’s not much new here information-wise, but some exciting graphics make viewing worthwhile.

Filip Horvat shows us how to:

Set up framework for testing security in API Platform (Symfony)

eCommerce

And Webkul shows us how to:

Generate Symfony route in PrestaShop module

Magecom explores:

Profiling and Debugging for Magento and What to Consider When Choosing

Lemberg Solutions looks at:

Drupal Commerce + SAP Integration: Solutions and Benefits

CMSs

bitExpert announces:

Sulu Security.txt Bundle 0.1.0 released!

André Laugks shows us how to:

Use XInclude to organize Content elements in Page templates in Sulu

Hurray, Sulu CMS pieces.

Opensource examines:

3 myths about open source CMS platforms

Specbee shows us how to:

Migrate to Drupal 9 (or 10) Without Losing Your Hard-Earned SEO Ranking

And ComputerMinds shares a series on updating a Drupal Site:

Drupal 10 upgrade: Defining the project scope

Drupal 10 upgrade: File to media

Speaking of versions CTI Digital looks at:

Drupal Through The Years: The Evolution of Drupal

And:

How Drupal Has Evolved to Make Content Editors Lives Easier

ADCI Solutions reviews the official Drupal frontend theme.

Olivero Drupal Theme

Adam Vertsson explores:

7 security modules for Drupal that you cannot live without

Drupal Journal shows us how to:

Create custom Middlewares in Drupal

And Marouene shows us how to:

Enforce Drupal Conventional commits using GrumPHP

Matt Glaman wants us to:

Check out the "Drupal at your fingertips" developer reference guide

Very helpful.

Evolving Web shares:

Hands-On With Drupal 10: Discover the Best Modules Through Project Browser

Axelerant looks at:

How Acquia DXP Is Empowering Businesses To Design Digital Experiences

Speaking of Acquia, it and Drupal’s founder, Dries Buytaert opines on:

Artificial Intelligence, the future of Content Management and the Web

He’s much more optimistic than I am.

Lullabot examines:

Orientation and Wayfinding: A Quick Overview

Palantir shares:

Yang's DrupalEasy Fellowship Experience: Taking a chance on a career change

Previous Weeks

And this one I missed in February:

Tessa's DrupalEasy Fellowship Experience: Collaborative, supportive, and agile

Drupal Journal also has:

Printing a certificate by using the pdf_api in Drupal

Dynamic routes and route_callbacks in Drupal

Specbee explores:

Taming JavaScript in Drupal (Includes FAQs)

ADCI Solutions also reviews the official Drupal backend theme.

Claro Admin Theme

Jolicode examines:

How TaggedLocator Can Help You Design a Better Symfony Application

PHP

This Week

The PHP Foundation’s latest roundup is out.

PHP Core Roundup #10

Tomasz Dobrowolski has two articles for us:

9 Essential PHPStorm Shortcuts That Will Skyrocket Your Productivity as a PHP Developer

7 Concepts Every PHP Developer Must Understand To Succeed

Outstanding stuff here.

George looks at:

Clean Architecture with PHP

Also excellent.

Muhammad Noman Rauf shares a:

Guide to Managing Dependencies with Composer

Florian Bauer shares the cogent point that PHP needs better marketing.

Why PHP should be renamed to HypeScript

Farhan Tanvir is back with another:

7 Useful PHP Libraries You Should Use in Your Next Project

Tom Smykowski has:

PHP 8.3 Coming Soon: json_validate()

Samuel Fontebasso looks at:

PHP+Nginx with Docker in production

Nacho Colomina Torregrosa explores:

Using GitHub actions to execute your PHP tests after every push

Hamid Ghorashi explores:

Using DTOs for Safe Data Transport in PHP Projects

php[architect] examines:

Serializing Data In PHP

And on a related note, Veshraj Ghimire explores a:

Deserialization Disaster in PHP

The Tech Cat opines on:

PHP and Artificial Intelligence: A Match Made in Heaven

Alin Pintilie looks at:

PHP generators or how to simplify iterators

Vlad Reshetilo examines:

The difference between PHP-Imagick and PHP-GD

Camilo Herrera looks at:

Querying Whois information with PHP

Lukasz explores:

Asynchronous PHP

This is an interesting article, as he is not discussing threads.

Localheinz examines organizing tests code:

Systems under test

Charles Sprayberry shares:

Introducing database-test-case

Previous Weeks

Stefan Priebsch explores:

Domain-Driven Design with PHP

Joe Tannenbaum examines:

Creating a Loading Spinner in the Terminal Using PHP

Other

Please visit our Support Ukraine page to learn how you can help kick Russia out of Ukraine (eventually).

The cyber response to Russia’s War Crimes and other douchebaggery

This week marked the one-year anniversary of Russia’s reign of terror in Ukraine. So, there were a lot of good articles published.

TechCrunch reports:

A year on from Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian startups show astounding resilience

Hacker group defaces Russian websites to display the Kremlin on fire

Ampere News reports:

A Ukrainian cyber defender looks back after 1 year in the trenches: "This is war and crazy tragedy"

The Next Web reports:

Ukraine’s year of war exposes changing roles for cyber weapons

DarkReading reports:

How the Ukraine War Opened a Fault Line in Cybercrime, Possibly Forever

The Washington Post reports:

Impact of Ukraine-Russia war: Cybersecurity has improved for all

CEPA reports:

Sanctions Against Russia Are More Effective Than Skeptics Suggest

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

Grid reports:

One year later, Russia’s misinformation war is still getting help from western companies.

Axios reports:

Russian cybercrime is starting to rebound after war disruption

HackRead reports:

News Corp: Hackers sat undetected on its network for 2 years

He He He. They are about as competent (aka shit) at cybersecurity as they are at “journalism”.

The Register reports:

Russian hacktivists DDoS hospitals, with pathetic results

Ars Technica reports:

Russia fines Wikipedia for publishing facts instead of Kremlin war propaganda

Bleeping Computer reports:

Russia bans private messaging apps owned by foreign entities

The Guardian reports:

China spends billions on pro-Russia disinformation, US special envoy says

Bleeping Computer reports:

Chinese hackers use new custom backdoor to evade detection

Cybersecurity/Privacy

And:

White House releases new U.S. national cybersecurity strategy

Hackernoon reports:

Network Detection and Response: the Future of Cybersecurity

Portswigger reports:

NIST plots biggest ever reform of Cybersecurity Framework

CSF 2.0 blueprint offered up for public review

NBC News reports:

U.S. Marshals Service suffers 'major' security breach that compromises sensitive information, senior law enforcement officials say

GovTech reports:

Feds Push Local Election Officials to Boost Security Ahead of 2024

Darkreading reports:

What GoDaddy's Years-Long Breach Means for Millions of Clients

More

The Markup asks:

Section 230 Is a Load-Bearing Wall—Is It Coming Down?

Jens Oliver Meiert maintains this handy tool.

HTML Elements Index

Jennifer Wjertzoch shows us:

How to Make a Fully Accessible CSS-Only Carousel

No JS required. For more like this check out the CSSUI link in our website’s footer.

Spicyweb points out the obvious:

The Great Gaslighting of the JavaScript Era

JS frontend frameworks are bullshit.

KD Nuggets shares:

SQL Query Optimization Techniques

Mafiree explores the:

Significance of using Invisible Primary key (GIPK) with MySQL 8.0

Kinsta shows us how to:

Remove Docker Images, Volumes, and Containers in Seconds

Fediverse

Andy Piper has:

Thoughts on Dev Rel in the post-Twitter era

There is big news this week from Flipboard.

Via TechCrunch:

Flipboard joins the Fediverse with a Mastodon integration and community, plans for ActivityPub

Engadget looks at what drove the decision.

Flipboard is leaning into Mastodon — and away from Twitter

As doe the Fediverse Report.

Flipboard joins the Fediverse

Here’s the official announcement.

The Future of Flipboard Is Federated

So, if you are on Flipboard but not Mastodon, now is the time to join.

And follow us on Flipboard to get an idea of what will be in next week’s communiqué.

The Verge reports:

Mozilla thinks Mastodon could be the next HTTP

Also, this week, Medium started allowing signups to their Mastodon instance. If you are also interested in content production, marketing, strategy, and related fields, you can follow me at @mobileatom@me.dm.

And don’t forget that Tumblr and Flickr are joining in the future.

CTAs

Do you own or work for an organization that would be interested in our promotion opportunities? Or supporting our journalistic efforts? If so, please get in touch with us. We’re in our infancy, so it’s extra economical. 😉

More importantly, if you are a Ukrainian company with coding-related products, we can offer free promotion on our Support Ukraine page. Or, if you know of one, get in touch.

Keep coding Symfonistas!

section separator
Article Type
Donate using Liberapay

Symfony Station covers the essential news in the Symfony, PHP, and Fediverse development communities with a focus on protecting democracy. Please use the button above to make a small donation to help cover our out-of-pocket costs. Our labor is provided free of charge to support the communities we write about.

Join our newsletter list

Subscribe to The Payload, our weekly newsletter exploring the Symfony Universe.

  Start exploring!