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Symfony Station Communiqué - 24 May 2024

By Reuben Walker, 24 May, 2024
Small robot reading a book

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. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can't be free without safety and privacy.

There's good content in all of our categories, so please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you. This is why we publish on Fridays. So you can savor it over your weekend.

Or jump straight to your favorite section.

Once again, thanks go out to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our communiqué in their Week of Symfony.

My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans.

Symfony

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

Highlight -> "This week, the first release candidate version of Symfony 7.1 was published so you can test it in your own projects before the stable release in two weeks. Meanwhile, we continued publishing more talks and information about the upcoming SymfonyOnline June 2024 conference."

A Week of Symfony #907 (13-19 May 2024)

They also have:

SymfonyLive Berlin 2024 postponed to 2025

New in Symfony 7.1: Commands Improvements

New in Symfony 7.1: Mapped Route Parameters

A good alternative to the MapEntity attribute in certain cases.

SymfonyCon Vienna 2024 - Submit your talk before July 8th

SymfonyOnline June 2024: Using container's features to manage complexity

New in Symfony 7.1: POSIX Signals Improvements

SymfonyOnline June 2024: Designing Security-First Symfony Apps

Introducing Symfony Jobs

SymfonyCasts is back with:

Kevin Bond (aka Zenstruck) joins SymfonyCasts

Great news.


Featured Item

Taggart writes:

I would never have imagined a year ago that Google would kill web searching as we know it. I did not expect absolutely every product in the tech sector to attempt to increase valuation by tossing LLMs into their product, regardless of functionality or utility. Perhaps I should have.

But the rapid takeover of the web by generative text and images? That I did see coming, and here we are. I don't know about you, but interacting with the wider web these days feels like I'm picking up a device with an exposed wire that zaps me about 50% of the time. It used to be 30%. Next week, it may be 70%. Point is, the web I grew up with, fell in love with, and have—in many ways—built a life around, is being choked out of existence. ...

For the rest of this piece, I'll be referring to this idea of "The Human Web." This is the network of sites and works created by people, without generative assistance. It is art, culture, journalism, history, technical information, and more. Is it commerce? Personally I think it has to be, but we'll get to that.

Meditations on The Human Web


This Week

Ion Bazan shows us:

Write Future-Compatible PHP Code with Symfony Polyfills

Sylvain Blondeau's latest newsletter is out:

Level 3 : Symfony 7.1 is coming

Which is unfortunately on Substack. He has great videos as well. Unfortunately, they are on YouTube. And they are both in French. But still check them out! ;)

David Garcia explores:

Using Symfony Console and Google Cloud API to translate your projects

Yonel Ceruto shares:

Symfony App Config in 2 steps

Radhwan Ben Youssef shows us:

How to Use Traits in Symfony

Nacho Colomina Torregrosa demonstrates:

Using a Symfony secret to encode your JWT Tokens

eCommerce

Sylius examines:

Expanding eCommerce into International Markets with Sylius

CMSs

Sulu shows us:

How To Merge Two Sulu Instances Together

Concrete CMS looks at:

Enhancing On-Site Search Functionality: Best Practices for Websites

The Next Marketplace

TYPO3 has:

My First TYPO3 General Assembly

Improve TYPO3 Error Log — Q2 Budget Idea Report

Status Update on the Asynchronous Image Rendering Initiative for TYPO3

Joomla has:

The May Issue

Content Templates - the Joomla Page Builder you didn't know you already had

Templates for Joomla - Episode 1: Templates, Frameworks & Clubs or not…

Drupal has:

DrupalCon Portland 2024 - Recapping Drupal’s most significant North American event!

Drupal GAAD Pledge 2024 Update

Specbee is:

Starstruck by the Drupal Starshot Initiative

The Drop Times has:

Acquia Engage London 2024: Insights from Featured Speakers

There are also stops in Paris, Tokyo, Boston. I attended the one in Miami last year and these are good events.

Enhancing Drupal 11: Transitioning Deprecated Modules to Contributed Alternatives

Drupal Launches IXP Fellowship Initiative Survey to Support Inexperienced Developers

On a related note, DrupalEasy opines:

Drupal needs new, young developers

And:

Ruminations on Drupal Starshot

Wim Leers starts work on:

XB (Experience Builder) week 1: 0.x branch opened!

Agile Drop has:

Drupal Starshot - what is it & what does it mean for Drupal?

They look at it from the low code perspective. Hence ⬇️.

Low-code/no-code & the future of digital experience management

Gizra shows us:

How We Made Drupal Starter 2X Faster for Authenticated Users

Tag1 Consulting continues a series:

Migrating Your Data from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10: Known issues

Golems explores:

Simplifying Form Work in Drupal 10: Best Practices and Plugins

Salsa Digital asks:

Why Use Drupal?

And gives a very comprehensive answer.

1X Internet lists:

CMS features every editor and marketer needs 

Gregg Boogs demonstrates:

Transitioning from Drupal 7 to Backdrop CMS 

Previous Weeks

Gavin Murambadoro shows us:

How to start a Symfony 7 application with Docker without having PHP locally installed on your machine

Vsevolod Girenko examines:

Consistent validation with API Platform 3

JoliCode shares:

Ajouter un champ de texte statique dans un formulaire EasyAdmin

Lullabot looks at:

Drupal Release Planning in the Enterprise

Debug Academy shows us:

How to create custom sorting logic for Drupal views

Acquia covers:

The four big Drupal themes of DrupalCon Portland 2024

Capellic continues a series:

Frontend performance optimization for Drupal websites: Part 4

Amazee has:

DrupalCon Portland 2024 in 1,800 Words

LagoonCon Portland 2024 Recap


PHP

This Week

And announces:

amazee.io Unveils Self-Sign-Up

I am definitely checking this out.

Metaphorically Speaking explores:

Primitive Obsession

php [architect] examines:

PHP’s Magic Methods

Ion Bazan has:

How to see what changed in Composer files

This is a prequel to the Symfony article above.

Turn a country code into an emoji flag

Fernando Castillo says:

Value Objects in PHP can protect you from bad data

Alex Castellano shows us:

How To Create WebP Images With PHP

PHPStan announces:

PHPStan 1.11 with Error Identifiers and New PHPStan Pro UI

Jonas Elias has:

Substituindo o Redis pelo Valkey em projetos PHP/Hyperf

Chris Sprayberry demonstrates:

Annotated Container Without Attributes

Sarah Savage explores:

Air Traffic Control: Routing microservices with a single Nginx server

Mohamed Ahmed is:

Implementing Feature Flagging in PHP Using AST Parsers

Khairu Aqsara demonstrates:

Avoiding Imports and Aliases in PHP

Sohel Ahmed shares:

Understanding Prepared Statements in PHP and MySQL

Paul Underwood has a quick tip:

Performance Metrics Using Guzzle

Wasmer examines:

Running PHP blazingly fast at the Edge with WebAssembly

This sounds awesome. You can test drive it with Symfony, Laravel, and WordPress.

Darko Todorić shows us:

How to configure PHP in Airflow?

Itsimiro is:

Unlocking the Power of Attributes in PHP 

Laravel News looks at:

New Proposed Array Find Functions in PHP 8.4

Grant Horwood shows us how to do it now:

php: write php 8.4’s array_find from scratch


More Programming

And has:

bash: splitting tarballs the ‘easy’ way

This is interesting.

TechCrunch opines:

I’m rooting for Melinda French Gates to fix tech’s broken ‘brilliant jerk’ culture

That would be great.

Bruce Lawson declares:

CSS :has(), the God Selector

My man Jason Knight explores:

Testing Website Speed And Quality

And as usual, it's not looking good for frontend frameworks.

Smashing Magazine has:

Hidden vs. Disabled In UX

Modern CSS Layouts: You Might Not Need A Framework For That

Best Practices For Naming Design Tokens, Components, Variables, And More

Switching It Up With HTML’s Latest Control

Frontend Masters asks:

We’ve Got Container Queries Now, But Are We Actually Using Them?

Roman Agabekov shows us:

How to Check MySQL Database and Table Sizes


Fighting for Democracy

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

The Hacker News reports:

Chinese Nationals Arrested for Laundering $73 Million in Pig Butchering Crypto Scam

404 Media reports:

Hacker Breaches Scam Call Center, Warns Victims They've Been Scammed

Ars Technica reports:

Tesla shareholder group opposes Musk’s $46B pay, slams board “dysfunction”

They recommend the board vote against Elon Musk's $46 billion pay package and to vote against the reelection of board members Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch. Which the full board would do if they were capitalists as opposed to ass-licking ideologues.

Google Search’s “udm=14” trick lets you kill AI search for good

BitDefender reports:

23-year-old alleged founder of dark web Incognito Market arrested after FBI tracks cryptocurrency payments

TechCrunch reports:

‘Pro-competition’ rules for Big Tech make it through UK’s pre-election wash-up

The Register reports:

Man behind deepfake Biden robocall indicted on felony charges, faces $6M fine 

This sets a good precedent. Because, unfortunately there is more of this coming.

???

Ars Technica reports:

Lawmakers say Section 230 repeal will protect children—opponents predict chaos

If they passed a law canceling it for Big Tech only, that would move it up a section.

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

DarkReading reports:

Russia's Turla APT Abuses MSBuild to Deliver TinyTurla Backdoor

EuroNews has:

Russia waging shadow war on West: Estonia PM

Why is Central Europe at heightened risk of fake news ahead of European elections?

Pravda Ukraine reports:

Russia uses Moldova as testing ground for new influence technologies – Moldovan Foreign minister

The Markup reports:

The Inside Story of the YouTube Influencer Who Peddles Misinformation to Vietnamese Communities

The Hacker News reports:

Inside Operation Diplomatic Specter: Chinese APT Group's Stealthy Tactics Exposed

TechDirt opines:

Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline

The Verge reports:

Lawyers say OpenAI could be in real trouble with Scarlett Johansson

404 Media reports:

Google Is Paying Reddit $60 Million for Fucksmith to Tell Its Users to Eat Glue

This may be the greatest article title of all time. And fuck both these c^nts.

Nonconsensual AI Porn Maker Accidentally Leaks His Customers' Emails

Amazon Kills Shareholder Proposals on Worker Protections and AI Oversight

Sherwood News reports:

Facebook's top poster is a Catholic fundamentalist page. Is Meta OK?

Uh, no.

Vox reports:

“Everyone is absolutely terrified”: Inside a US ally’s secret war on its American critics

Cybersecurity/Privacy

The Register reports:

With ransomware whales becoming so dominant, would-be challengers ask 'what's the point?'

Dark Reading reports:

Transforming CISOs Into Storytellers

This is a good strategy.

BleepingComputer reports:

High-severity GitLab flaw lets attackers take over accounts

The Next Web reports:

Dutch cybercops tracked a crypto theft to one of the world’s worst botnets


Fediverse / ActivityPub

The Fediverse Report has:

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 69

Conspirador Norteño looks at:

Federation and political spam

Hypha announces:

Social Reader is out!

Explore this if you aren't quite ready for a Fediverse account.

TechCrunch reports:

Meta’s Oversight Board takes its first Threads case

Not Root explores:

Adding a Fediverse Share Button to my Emacs Nikola Blog

Digiday reports on:

Why publishers are preparing to federate their sites

We Distribute has:

A Primer on Mastodon’s New Board Members

FediVision 2024 is Live! Listen and Vote!

There are only a few days left to vote.

Other federated social media

And:

Bluesky Introduces Direct Messages

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

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.

You can find a vast array of curated evergreen content on our communiques page.

Author

Reuben Walker

Founder
Symfony Station

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