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.
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!
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Symfony
As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.
This week, Symfony released maintenance versions 5.4.50, 6.4.29, and 7.3.7 to address a potential security vulnerability. Meanwhile, we continued polishing the upcoming Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 releases and published 7.4.0 RC1 and 8.0.0 RC1. Finally, we shared new details about several of the talks planned for SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025.
November 10–16, 2025: A Week of Symfony 985
They also have:
New in Symfony 7.4 Better PHP Configuration
New in Symfony 7.4 Extending Validation and Serialization with PHP Attributes
New in Symfony 7.4 Misc. Features (Part 1)
SymfonyCasts has:
Blackfire has:
Blackfire now supports PHP 8.5
Featured Item
Dries Buyaert writes:
Ten years ago, Acquia shut down Drupal Gardens, a decision that I still regret.
We had launched Drupal Gardens in 2009 as a SaaS platform that let anyone build Drupal websites without touching code. Long-time readers may remember my various blog posts about it.
It was pretty successful. Within a year, 20,000 sites were running on Drupal Gardens. By the time we shut it down, more than 100,000 sites used the platform.
Looking back, shutting down Drupal Gardens feels like one of the biggest business mistakes we made.
The product we should not have killed
I had a Drupal Gardens site back in the day.
This Week
Matt Mochalkin has:
Blazing Fast Symfony: How to Shave Milliseconds Off Your Response Time (The Ultimate Guide)
Time as a Dependency: Advanced Patterns with the Symfony Clock
David Duymelinck shares:
My 2 cents on the new Symfony PHP configuration format.
JoliCode announces:
JoliMediaBundle, a new media bundle for your Symfony projects
CMSs
Joomla has:
Highlights include:
George Orwell’s Six Rules of Writing Can Help You Create Bookmark-Worthy Joomla Content
Test your Extension, Part 2: Cypress
TYPO3 has:
Report from the TYPO3 Code Sprint in Geneva
Short Report From the Best Practice — after Halloween — Remote Code Sprint
Wolfgang Wagner has:
TYPO3 v14: Drei Fluid 5 Breaking Changes für Integratoren
Newsletter-Umfrage 2025: Was ich umsetze (und was schwierig ist)
Drupal has:
DrupalCon Lands in Japan: Historic Momentum as Drupal Eyes Its Next Chapter
The first three emphasis areas are great. We'll see on the fourth.
Who Will You Nominate? The 2026 Aaron Winborn Award Opens Today
Dries Buyaert has:
The Drop Times reports:
DCoE Finds: "The Drupal Economy Is Struggling, But There’s Hope"
Hence Drupal CMS, Canvas, and Acquia Space.
Dripyard shows us:
What to look for when evaluating a Drupal theme
Doing a solid for one of my Florida Drupal buddies.
ImageX Media shows us:
One Module, Many Layers of Defense: How to Protect Your Drupal Site with Security Kit
DDEV has:
Tag1 announces:
Now Available: Tag1’s First Public Security Update for Drupal 7 Core
Drunomics shares:
drunomics Celebrates Sinduri Winning the Women in Drupal Award
Specbee explores:
8 Ways to fully optimize images in Drupal (and boost your Core Web Vitals!)
Previous Week
Seroto Ninja (Wolf) goes:
Beyond CSS: Multi-Format Font Export for Symfony
Droptica examines:
Drupal Field Module – Expand Its Possibilities with 10 Useful Modules
PHP
This Week
Markus Staab looks at:
New and noteworthy: PHPStan and PHPUnit integration
PHP Architect explores:
The Secret Header That Makes Your PHP App 10x More Secure
Ash Allen has:
Immutable and Mutable Dates in PHP
The Difference Between ?: and ?? in PHP
Exakat examines:
Tideways looks at:
What’s new in PHP 8.5 in terms of performance, debugging and operations
Packagist explores:
What’s New in Private Packagist, November Update
Paytoliya InfoTech examines:
PHP 8.4 Performance Optimization: A Deep Dive into the New JIT Enhancements
PHP.Watch shows us how to:
Install and Upgrade to PHP 8.5 on Debian and Ubuntu
Zend has:
PHP Monolith to Microservices: When to Split Web Applications
More Programming
Open Project shows us:
How to use OpenProject as OKR software
DarkReading reports:
Cursor Issue Paves Way for Credential-Stealing Attacks
150,000 Packages Flood NPM Registry in Token Farming Campaign
BleepingComputer reports:
Malicious NPM packages abuse Adspect redirects to evade security
The Register reports:
Devs gripe about having AI shoved down their throats
Ahmad Alfy says:
Frontend Masters explores:
More CSS random() Learning Through Experiments
Joomla has:
DDEV explains:
Ars Technica reports:
Massive Cloudflare outage was triggered by file that suddenly doubled in size
SensioLabs has:
Why Tests? Explained for Management
Fighting for Democracy
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
TechPolicy Press says:
If Europe Wants Digital Sovereignty, It Must Reinvent Who Owns Tech
MIT Technology Review reports:
Quantum physicists have shrunk and “de-censored” DeepSeek R1
The Evil Empire Strikes Back
The Guardian reports:
Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage
The ACLU reports:
Your Smartphone, Their Rules: How App Stores Enable Corporate-Government Censorship
Yep.
Cybersecurity and Privacy
DarkReading asks:
Can a Global, Decentralized System Save CVE Data?
Heise reports:
3.5 Billion Accounts: Complete WhatsApp Directory Retrieved and Evaluated
Signal or Delta Chat peeps.
Fediverse
Ben Werdmuller reports on:
The State of the Open Social Web
Great Stuff as usual from Ben.
Big news with Mastodon this week:
The Future is Ours to Build - Together
Hopefully the new regime (foundation vs. benevolent dictator) will focus on safety and not trying to be Twitter 2.
Other Slightly Federated Social Media
Connected Places has:
ATmosphere Report 143 - Eurosky Live
TechCrunch reports:
Bluesky announces moderation changes focused on better tracking, improved transparency
CTAs (aka show us some free love)
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