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.
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 the team at Symfony for sharing our communiqué in their Week of Symfony.
My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. Fuck 'em!
There is some news about us this week. We are definitely retiring next year and sooner than expected. Once we move to Europe, I don't want to spend 30 hours a week working on Symfony Station and Battalion. Producing short documentaries will be my main hobby.
But, I am willing to spend 10 hours weekly on The Programmer’s Fulcrum. It's the future (and smaller) home for a fusion of Symfony Station and Battalion. Its tagline is Devs Defending Democracy.
For now its built with Ghost though WordPress is still in the running as a long-term site/newsletter/fediverse account solution. Sorry Drupal CMS you are dead in the water.
In any event, you can sign up now and for 2025 get an email with links to and featured articles for each week's Symfony Station Communiqué and Battalion "Destroying Autocracy" post. And you’ll be set with TPF after the fusing. I appreciate all of you.
Symfony
As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.
This week, Symfony completed the migration to PHPUnit 12 in the 7.4 branch, which required many changes during the past weeks, such as replacing annotations with attributes. In addition, we updated the container XML dumping process to not require the PHP XML extension. Finally, we also published more details about the hackday to be celebrated during the SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025 conference.
August 4–10, 2025: A Week of Symfony 971
They also have:
SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025 Unconference Track at SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025
Featured Item
Dries Buytaert has:
To protect the digital foundation of essential government services, governments should invest in Open Source as public infrastructure and shift from consumption to contribution.
Funding Open Source like public infrastructure
I disagree with 88.2% of Dries' AI stance of letting the Agencies tail wag the Drupal dog, but he's 100% correct about this. ;)
This Week
Deuchnord has a tool to:
Ban AI crawlers from visiting your Symfony website or application
Jinal Solanki shows us:
How to Add a Maintenance Page in a Symfony + Angular Project (Two Effective Approaches)
David Duymelinck asks:
Do you really need service subscribers?
What do we want to solve with a template engine?
Roman Huliak shares:
How Sentry slowed down my Symfony APP — and how to prevent it in production
How Tos
Laurent MN asks:
Symfony 7 Dependency Injection: What Really Happens Behind the Scenes
e-Commerce
Sylius has:
PrestaShop has:
Meet the PrestaShop Wall of Fame
Other
Mautic has:
Mautic graduates from the GitHub Secure Open Source Program
CMSs
Concrete CMS has:
Concrete CMS August 2025 Monthly Roundup
Joomla has:
Joomla Group 1 Elections - Nominee Announcement 2025
Sven Schultschik shares:
Linktree Webseite - Die Evolution der Startseite
My german consists of "dunkelweissen bitte, danke" so break out your translator.
TYPO3 has:
Content Blocks — International Exchange and Major Feature Releases
TYPO3 9.5.54, 10.4.53, and 11.5.47 ELTS Released
Wolfgang Wagner shares:
400 Mitglieder: Wie aus einer Idee eine echte TYPO3-Community wurde
Koehnlein has a review:
Recap TYPO3 Developer Days 2025
Drupal has:
Accelerating Innovation: Introducing the Drupal AI Initiative
A Drupal Couple explores:
Orchestrating Development Teams Like Kubernetes
ImageX Media has:
Drupal Content Categorization, #1: Options for Nonprofits and Higher Ed to Tame Complex Content
Drupal Content Categorization, #2: Scale Your Vocabularies with Ease Using Taxonomy Manager
Jofitz shows us:
How to create a custom Drupal plugin
Timbers Dev shares:
Why It’s Time to Upgrade to Drupal 11
Specbee shows us:
How outdated CRM & donation systems hurt your nonprofit’s fundraising (and how to fix it)
Smartbees asks:
How to Add Schema Markup to Drupal Site?
PHP
This Week
The PHP Foundation announces:
PHP 8.5.0 Beta 1 available for testing
Alex Seifert is:
Rethinking How I Create Personal Websites
Oleksandr Vasyliev examines:
Lazy Evaluation in PHP: Real‑World Memory Savings with Generators
Denis looks at:
Creating our own package in php
Doğan Uçar continues a (gated) series on Medium:
Generics in PHP: Hands-On with Compile-Time Generics
The Tricky Parts of PHP’s Compile-Time Generics (Variance, Traits, and Other Dragons)
PHP Trying PHP’s Compile-Time Generics: From Sandbox to RFC Feedback
PHP Generics: The Ecosystem Impact of Compile-Time
Beyond Compile-Time: The Future of Generics and PHP’s Type System
Thodoris Kouleris explores the:
Jarosław Szutkowski examines:
Benchmarking Array Merges in PHP: When to Optimise and Why It Matters
Ann R looks at:
How to Optimize PHP Applications with Docker and Reduce Deployment Time by 70%
A good reference article.
DDEV shares its:
Walisson Aguirra shares:
PHP além do composer: Gerenciamento de Extensões PHP: Do PECL ao Moderno PIE
Muench Dev has:
Danke, Composer – zum Abschied von Version 1
Tideways explores:
Autoloading Performance – Avoid These 5 Mistakes!
L//P examines:
Using PGBouncer to improve PHP applications running in the cloud
php[architect] looks at:
PHP Fibers: The Game-Changer That Makes Async Programming Feel Like Magic
More Programming
Infrequently asks:
How Do Committees Fail To Invent?
The Verge reports:
GitHub just got less independent at Microsoft after CEO resignation
Fuck Microsoft and fuck GitHub. Use Codeberg peeps. Or self-host Forgejo.
JetBrains announces:
Increased Subscription Pricing for IDEs, .NET Tools, dotUltimate, and the All Products Pack
You’re gonna pay for this AI horseshit whether you want it or not. Pulse and VS Codium are looking better for everyone.
Embrace the Red explores:
Claude Code: Data Exfiltration with DNS
Grant Horwood explains:
NGINX: making basic auth useful
Speaking of NGINX, they have:
NGINX Introduces Native Support for ACME Protocol
The Register reports:
Back to being FOSS, Redis delivers a new, faster version
State of CSS examines the:
CSS Tricks says:
We Might Need Something Between Root and Relative CSS Units for “Base Elements”
Piccalilli shares:
Another article about centering in CSS
Fighting for Democracy
Here we feature several items from each section of Battalion's weekly "Defending Democracy" report.
Get all the news from the front of democracy's battle against autocracy via its latest "Defending Democracy" post. And please follow Battalion via RSS or on the Fediverse at battalion@battalion.mobileatom.net.
Please visit Symfony Stations Support Ukraine page to learn how you can help kick Russia out of Ukraine (eventually, like ending apartheid in South Africa).
The cyber response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery
TechCrunch reports:
Australian court finds Apple, Google abused app store market power
Commons DB has:
Connecting the Commons: Shared Benefits for Wikimedia Commons and CommonsDB
The Evil Empire Strikes Back
The Sunday Times has:
Signal boss: ‘disturbing’ laws show the UK doesn’t understand tech
Euractiv has:
Palantir is well on its way to conquering Europe
Cybersecurity and Privacy
The Register reports:
DEF CON hackers plug security holes in US water systems amid tsunami of threats
We need more of this type of pro-bono work.
Deepfake detectors are slowly coming of age, at a time of dire need
Fediverse
Connected Places has:
IFTAS says:
The 2025 Fediverse Needs Assessment is Open: Have Your Say
Other Slightly Federated Social Media
TechCrunch reports:
Bluesky rolls out massive revamp to policies and Community Guidelines
CTAs (aka show us some free love)
- That’s it for this week. Please share this communiqué.
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You can find a vast array of curated evergreen content on our communiqués page.
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