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.
My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. Fuck 'em!
I also go on a Drupal rant, so fair warning.
Symfony
As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.
This week, development focused on the upcoming Symfony 7.4 and 8.0 releases. We added new features such as the ObjectMapperAwareInterface, improved value transformers in JsonStreamer, and enabled loading JSON via imports in AssetMapper. We also removed deprecated features, including Doctrine entity auto-mapping. In addition, we announced more details about SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025.
July 21–27, 2025 A Week of Symfony 969
Blackfire advises:
Give your observability context: name your front-end transactions
SymfonyCasts has:
Featured Item
Ivan Vulovic writes:
In the first part of this series, we ran a series of raw performance benchmarks between FrankenPHP and PHP-FPM using a minimal PHP script. The goal was to isolate and compare the performance of the underlying HTTP server mechanisms — not PHP itself, nor any application logic.
This time, we’re taking it further.
We’re swapping out the simple echo "Hello World" script with something real — a modern Symfony project, including routing, services, and, eventually, a large set of dependencies and bundles.
FrankenPHP vs PHP-FPM (Part 2): Symfony Under Real Load and Why Workers Win
You might want to read part 1 in the PHP Previous Weeks section below first.
This Week
Doğan Uçar explores:
Fixing “Allowed memory size exhausted” in Symfony: When Doctrine Metadata Crashes Your Serializer
How Tos
Laurent MN has:
DDEV + Symfony 7: The Ultimate Local Setup Without the Headaches
e-Commerce
PrestaShop announces:
Centarro (Drupal Commerce) asks:
Will Shopify Plus Work For Your B2B Commerce Website?
CMSs
Concrete CMS has:
Plugins, Updates, and Panic: A Day in the Life of a Modern Web Manager
TYPO3 has:
The Documentation Team is Looking for Superheroes
Wolfgang Wagner shares:
TYPO3-Tipp: Wenn Anführungszeichen vor Zahlen zum Problem werden
Drupal has:
Transform Your Business by Sponsoring a Drupal Leader
The new Contribution Records system
The Drupal Association Announces 2025 Board Election Winner and Additional Board Members
Big surprise, someone from an agency.
Dries Buyaert drinks the Kool-Aid:
Why Drupal is built for the AI era
This AI overconfidence and naive optimism is one of the reasons I migrated this site to Grav CMS off Drupal. That and Drupal is a nightmare to maintain.
At least AI is optional at this point. And modular.
Drupal has always put agencies ahead of its users, so this tracks. As usual end users will have to work around the overcomplicated horseshit to build their sites the way they want to.
Just FYI, to this point Drupal CMS isn't much of an improvement. Although to be fair, some good things are coming.
Vardot lists:
10 Drupal Trends to Watch in 2025
LakeDrops announces:
Drupal's Modeler API released - learn about the benefits
Cool.
Specbee examines:
Getting started with Lando and Drupal
Smartbees shows us:
How to Configure the RobotsTxt Module in Drupal?
Useful.
1x Interntet shows us:
Keep your software healthy with refactoring
DevCollaborative says:
Hey Drupal Content Editors, Make Your Work Easier with Admin Menu Swap
Drupal Odyssey shows us how to:
Bulletproof Your Drupal Data With Automated Nightly Backups
Droptica has a history lesson:
Drupal 7 vs Drupal 11 – How Have This System and Its Functionalities Changed?
John Picozzi shares:
Drupal + Mailgun: A Simple Setup for Transactional Email
Previous Weeks
Dejan Angelov looks at:
Testing delayed Symfony Messenger message handling with Behat
Ed shows us how to:
Optimiser PHP pour la production
PHP
This Week
Doğan Uçar says:
PHP’s Legacy License is About to Change — Here is what it means
Anton Dachauer shows us how to:
Generate .ics Files in PHP with Ease
Andrew Charles shares:
This Caching Layer Took My PHP App From 1,000 to 30,000 Req/Sec
You’re Not Using PHP OPcache Right, Here’s What You’re Missing
Ketut Dana has:
Hack Shared Hosting: Use Composer 2 + PHP 8.3 Without Root Access!
I may try this as automatic updates don't work for me in Drupal CMS because of the Composer version my hosting service provides.
Zend explores:
Creating Custom PHP Alerts Using ZendHQ and OpenTelemetry PHP Tools
Markus Staubb examines:
Mutation testing with Infection in PHP
Marcos Vilela has:
PHP-FPM sem o pool padrão www.conf: como desabilitar com segurança em ambiente multiusuário
Daniel Rotter explains:
Test creation methods on steroids with named parameters
Previous Weeks
Laravel News shows us how to:
Retrieve the Currently Executing Closure in PHP 8.5
Ivan Vulovic compares:
FrankenPHP vs PHP-FPM: Benchmarks, Surprises, and One Clear Winner
More Programming
The Register reports:
Zed code editor hears your prayers, rolls out AI-free mode
Tracebit reports:
Code Execution Through Deception: Gemini AI CLI Hijack
DarkReading reports:
ChatGPT, GenAI Tools Open to 'Man in the Prompt' Browser Attack
Joshtronic opines:
AI Code Completion is Cognitive Castration
Yep.
VentureBeat reports:
Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code
BleepingComputer reports:
AI-powered Cursor IDE vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks
If you haven't got the message yet, it's that if you let AI drive the coding bus you're going to end up in the ditch. And possibly dead.
404 Media reports:
Meta Is Going to Let Job Candidates Use AI During Coding Tests
Evolving Web shares:
When Accessibility Isn’t Easy: Website Features That Need Extra Love
Smashing Magazine looks at:
Web Components: Working With Shadow DOM
Great Stuff.
CSS Tricks explores:
Making a Masonry Layout That Works Today
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
The Evil Empire Strikes Back
TechDirt reports:
Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People
ArsTechnica reports:
Substack’s “Nazi problem” won’t go away after push notification apology
I am sorry, but if you are on SubStack at this point you are either an uninformed amoral moron or a c^nt. Thankfully, you can still avoid being reincarnated as a cockroach by moving to Ghost or Buttondown.
Cybersecurity and Privacy
DarkReading reports:
Supply Chain Attacks Spotted in GitHub Actions, Gravity Forms, npm
Platformer reports:
Trust and safety workers on why they're not speaking out
FYI, Platformer and 404 Media are on Ghost and not SuckStack.
Fediverse
Connected Places has:
QCB asks:
So Your Black Ass Still Wants to Get on Mastodon
Other Slightly Federated Social Media
Connected Places has:
Blacksky has:
Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power
Blacksky is what Bluesky would be if it wasn't created and run by tech bros.
CTAs (aka show us some free love)
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