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Symfony Station Communiqué - 29 March 2024

By Reuben Walker, 29 March, 2024
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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. Because open-source equals open societies, peeps. That necessitates a mission of destroying big tech. We also cover the cybersecurity world and the Fediverse (more open-source).

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.


Featured Item

Andrew Cairns says:

A lot can be learned about software development by playing retro games.

Composition over Inheritance

A legitimately awesome article in more ways than one.


Symfony

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

Highlight -> "This week, the upcoming Symfony 7.1 version added features such as a method to return all tokens after the command name, support for new DOM extension classes in VarDumper, some design updates in the workflow profiler panel and a way to apply attribute configurator to child classes in dependency injection."

A Week of Symfony #899 (18-24 March 2024)

SensioLabs wants you to:

Discover our Symfony events in February 2024

SymfonyCasts continues its free Symfony 7 course:

This week on SymfonyCasts!

This Week

Benjamin Eberlei shares:

A Stimulus Controller for the Bulma Navbar Component

tempest/highlight with Twig and Symfony

Terence Schneider says:

Boost Your Symfony Skills with PHPUnit Bridge

Ludovic Frank asks:

Changer les couleurs du thème de manière dynamique avec du CSS et Symfony ? C'est possible

Francis Lavoie created:

A Symfony OutputInterface decorator that inserts timestamps on every line

Tom examines:

Serverless Symfony Starter - Deploy Symfony to AWS 

eCommerce

Stephen Hochdörfer shares a:

Sylius Grid Deep Dive

Winkel Wagen has:

Migration: Find customer which can’t login, because they have multiple accounts

Shopware: Don’t reuse variables – webpack(!?)

Ingo Steinke looks at:

Shopware dev productivity and plugin validation 

CMSs

Sulu has:

Sulu CMS: A Developer’s Perspective

TYPO3 has:

Members Have Selected Four Ideas to be Funded in Quarter 2/2024

Community Budget Idea Report: ACL Improvements

Report From the Localization Team (2023)

Drupal has:

Pitchburgh update March 2024

Fantastic. Especially the frontend efforts.

Drupal 11.0 will require PHP 8.3 and MySQL 8.0

Allow themes to use a starterkit.yml file so it is easier to use the theme generator 

Great news.

The Drupal Association has a new:

Newsletter

Golems shares:

Efficient Token Usage in Drupal: Practical Tips and Examples 

Delicious Creative announces:

DrupalCamp Cemaes Brings Drupal Camps Back to the UK

Tag1 Consulting says:

Start Your Drupal Automated Performance Testing Today

Specbee explores the:

7 Most Popular Marketing Automation Drupal Modules - A Marketer's Guide

Oliver Davies reports:

Newport City Council running LocalGov Drupal

Markie(not Mark) examines:

Using the LocalGov Drupal Subsites Extras module

SKPR shares:

A practical guide to Docker contexts

Balink Pekkar looks at:

Automatic Updates

Good stuff, even if it is years overdue.

Lullabot has:

It Depends: A Website Context Primer

This is really more of a content than programming article.

Evolving Web shares:

What You Missed at DrupalCamp Florida 2024 

Théodore Biadala explores:

Replacing jQuery parents() with CSS :has()

Chromatic explains:

Why You Should Consider Drupal – Painless Migrations Drupal 10 Edition

ChapterThree has:

Tackling Complicated Drupal 7 Migrations

Previous Weeks

I ran across this free Symfony 6 course from BacaSoftware:

Free Symfony 6 Course | Symfony Tutorial

Amazee examines:

Summiting Success: A Recap of Drupal Mountain Camp 2024


PHP

Jason Knight looks at:

Failwind UI And The SPA Clown Shoes (HTML Illiteracy Part 4)

Accesto explores:

PHP Application Modernization — 10 Key Lessons Learned

Stitcher examines:

PHP in 2024

Jochelle Mendonca goes:

Beyond Basic Data Types: Exploring Entities and Value Objects

Tim Starling looks at:

A discrete event simulator in PHP

Rahul Chavan explores:

Final Classes and the Power of Composition in PHP

Max Zhang shows us:

How to Install Nginx with PHP and MariaDB (LEMP Stack) with Opcache, Redis and Let’s Encrypt on Ubuntu

Tideways examines:

Measuring the DOM Namespace Reconciliation Performance Fix

d1823 looks at:

Avoiding Pitfalls with Doctrine ORM: The Impact of Type Hints

Nikolay Nikolov shares:

Nose for Trouble: Unveiling the Tell, Don’t Ask Anti-Pattern

Breaking the Chains of Conditionals: A Journey into Polymorphic Refactoring 

Mastering the Observer Design Pattern with Practical Examples

Alex has:

The Unix Timestamp Explained

Gabriele Bellini advocates a:

Modern approach to WordPress plugin development

Good stuff.

Laradir (tongue in cheek) says:

PHP Is Like A Toilet 

Veliko Ristic show us:

How to Set up PHP Form Validation – Detailed Tutorial 


More Programming

MIT Technology Review reports:

The tech industry can’t agree on what open-source AI means. That’s a problem.

How Adobe’s bet on non-exploitative AI is paying off

GitHub examines:

Using GitHub Copilot in your IDE: Tips, tricks and best practices

Socket reports:

Redis License Shift Splits Community: Open Source Contributors Move to Fork

Mate Marschalko shares:

20 CSS One-Liners Every CSS Expert Needs to Know

Very helpful.

The Cascade says:

018: I love invokers and you should too

Smashing Mag looks at:

Setting And Persisting Color Scheme Preferences With CSS And A “Touch” Of JavaScript

Or none at all.

CSS Tricks explores:

The Power of :has() in CSS

Another way to get rid of some JS.

Jason Knight vents some more:

Overusing Preload And SrcSet ? Pathetic Desperation By Inept Developers?

Feel like you need to learn some HTML now 🌝, Adeyemo Adedoyin has:

Semantic HTML: Beginner’s Guide to Semantic Tags and Their Importance to Accessibility and SEO


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

MSN reports:

How Ukraine is using mobile phones on 6ft poles to stop drones 

Bleeping Computer reports:

Microsoft to shut down 50 cloud services for Russian businesses

Better late than never.

Radio Free Europe reports:

Samsung Pay System To Stop Using Russia's Mir Payment Cards

Ditto.

The Moscow Times reports:

Czechs Bust Major Russian Propaganda Network

Decipher reports:

U.S. Government Doubles Down on Chinese APT Warnings

DarkReading reports:

Chinese State-Sponsored Hackers Charged, Sanctions Levied by US

Open Web Advocacy reports:

EU opens DMA investigations of Apple, Meta, Google

EuroNews reports:

Brussels asks Big Tech to counter threats to integrity of European elections

TechCrunch reports:

Worldcoin hit with another ban order in Europe citing risks to kids

Amazon fined in Poland for dark pattern design tricks

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

The New York Times reports:

Russia Amps Up Online Campaign Against Ukraine Before U.S. Elections

CNN reports:

Ukraine relies on Starlink for its drone war. Russia appears to be bypassing sanctions to use the devices too 

The Hacker News reports:

N. Korea-linked Kimsuky Shifts to Compiled HTML Help Files in Ongoing Cyberattacks

The Next Web reports:

UK says Chinese cyberattacks ‘part of large-scale espionage campaign’

No shit.

The Verge reports:

Israel quietly rolled out a mass facial recognition program in the Gaza Strip 

Dark Reading reports:

Iran's Evolving Cyber-Enabled Influence Operations to Support Hamas

UN Peace Operations Under Fire From State-Sponsored Hackers 

404 Media reports:

Samsung-Backed AI Image Generator Produces Nonconsensual Porn

The Markup reports:

NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law

TechCrunch reports:

Facebook snooped on users’ Snapchat traffic in secret project, documents reveal

What do you Fediverse peeps who want to get in bed with Threads think about this?

Ars Technica reports:

Facebook let Netflix see user DMs, quit streaming to keep Netflix happy: Lawsuit

And this?

Whatever you think, as I have said before, I wish Threads and Bluesky good luck in destroying Shitter. But I am not interested in interacting with the Klanmas, Karens, narscssists, dipshits, and other assorted dumbasses on their platforms. Plus Facebook is a digital Pandora's box of evil. So, on a personal level Threads is blocked.

In any event let's be civil with each other when discussing it on the Fediverese. There's no need to help Zuck destroy it any faster than he will.

Cybersecurity/Privacy

Red Hat has an:

Urgent security alert for Fedora Linux 40 and Fedora Rawhide users

DarkReading reports:

GitHub Developers Hit in Complex Supply Chain Cyberattack

The Hacker News reports:

Darcula Phishing Network Leveraging RCS and iMessage to Evade Detection

BitDefender reports:

Sellafield nuclear waste dump faces prosecution over cybersecurity failures

GovTech reports:

U.S. ED, CISA Form Council to Tackle School Cybersecurity

The Register reports:

JetBrains keeps mum on 26 'security problems' fixed after Rapid7 spat


Fediverse / ActivityPub

The Fediverse Report has:

Last Week in Fediverse – ep 61

IFTAS announces:

FediForum Updates

Leonora Tindall declares:

The Fediverse is Already Dead

Very interesting read. It's not what you think.

Flipboard opines:

3 Reasons Creators Should Pay Attention to What’s Happening in the Fediverse

The Commune Blog looks:

Beyond Discord

Darnell Day shares:

Meta Mind Trick: Zuck & Mosseri Did Not Conquer The Fediverse Rankings

Three Ways Threads Will Bless & Burden The Fediverse

It's mostly going to enshitify it, though. Especially Mastodon.

We Distribute reports:

Fedi Garden to Instance Admins: “Block Threads to Remain Listed”

Good.

ShellSharks has:

Owning My Own Social, Why I've moved to a personal Mastodon instance

Daily Kos reports:

Other problems at Truth Social, and the Mastodon in the room

Other federated social media

Squeaki shares:

The dumb guide to join the IndieWeb

Freedom to Tinker reports:

Five Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media

The Verge has an interview:

Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber

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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