Here's your weekly Symfony Station highlights post. It's a roundup of Symfony, PHP, Drupal, Fediverse, and Cybersecurity news.
Welcome to this week's Symfony Station highlights. It's your review of the essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities focusing on protecting democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world and the Fediverse. There are lots of interesting PHP items this week.
Please take your time and enjoy the items most relevant and valuable to you.
Once again, thanks to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our latest communiqué in their Week of Symfony.
My opinions will be in bold. And will often involve profanity.
A significant proportion of the content we curate is on Medium. I highly recommend investing in a membership to access all the articles you want to read. It's a small investment that can boost your career. As you may have noticed, non-members can only access a limited number of articles per month.
Become a member here! The compensation we receive from your use of this link helps pay for our weekly communiqué.
Symfony
As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony. Highlight -> “This week, Symfony 5.4.22
and 6.2.8 maintenance versions were released. Meanwhile, we published a recap of the SymfonyLive Paris 2023 conference and announced the last days of the Early Bird of SymfonyCon 2023. Lastly, we published an article detailing the migration of symfony.com search engine to Meilisearch.“
A Week of Symfony #848 (27 March - 2 April 2023)
Symfony announced:
SymfonyCon Brussels 2023: Book your hotel and transportation now!
SymfonyCasts continues its second API Platform course.
Featured Item
Dark Reading says:
Companies face an ongoing struggle to quickly develop high-performing software and applications that are also highly secure. This is a delicate balance in today's environment, where trading security for speed could lead to disastrous consequences.
One method that companies are embracing to strike this balance is implementing the "shift left." The shift left in this context refers to moving practices related to testing software as early in the development process as possible.
If companies prioritize communications and make the DevOps process more transparent, team members will better know what vulnerabilities to look for.
4 Steps for Shifting Left & Winning the Cybersecurity Battle
This Week
Dev opines on:
A Strong Team: SPAs With Vue.js and Symfony
It’s certainly better than React or Angular.
André Laugks shows us how to:
Create a custom Symfony Normalizer for mapping values
JoliCode shows us:
How to use mock with Symfony's WebTestCase and PHPUnit
Kinsta shares:
Symfony vs Laravel: Battle of the PHP Frameworks
As I said on Mastodon this week, this is about the 2,425th Laravel / Symfony comparison article but it's from a reputable source and explains the strengths of each platform well. (FYI, they don't really compete against each other very often.)
Nacho Colomina Torregrosa says:
Take this into account when using Doctrine
eCommerce
ComputerMinds shows us:
How to: Implement an automated Drupal Commerce Order state transition
Harish Rajora shares:
The Definitive Guide to Magento Testing
Sylius announces their solution to:
The EU “Omnibus” directive in (e)Commerce
CMSs
AgileDrop interviews:
Dominique De Cooman of Dropsolid: Bringing together Drupal and Mautic
Very interesting interview.
I plan on exploring the following three items in-depth.
Russell Jones asks:
Drupal, Why Use Custom Content Types?
Webwash looks at:
Create a Search Page using Views in Drupal
Specbee has:
Customizing Content Display in Drupal: A Guide to Display Modes
Prometsource explores:
AI for Drupal Sites: To the Next Level and Beyond
Evolving Web gets:
Hands-On with Drupal 10: Easier Content Creation with the Claro Theme
Drupal founder Dries Buytaert examines:
The evolution of Drupal's composability: from the command line to the browser
They are getting it right after ten years.
On a related note, Opensense Labs looks at:
Plug & Play with New Drupal Recipes
PHP
This Week
The PHP Foundation has:
PHP Foundation Update, March 2023
PhpStorm shares:
What’s New In PhpStorm 2023.1: New UI Features, Better Performance, 3v4l Support, and More
And Sticher shares:
Dimitrios Lytras explores:
Moslem Deris examines:
Writing Simple Code in PHP: Techniques and Best Practices
Daniil Bazhenov continues a series:
How To Optimize the Code Structure of a Simple PHP Application as Your Project Grows
Marcin Czarnecki recommends:
Moumen Alisawe asks:
What is Pest and Why You Should Use It
Freek Van der Herten has:
Skipping tests conditionally in Pest
One of my favorite Mastodon follows, the Grumpy Programmer is:
Thinking About Testing Too Much
Tighten examines:
Automated Refactoring With Rector
Nemanja Milenkovic tells us:
Why PHP 8 and its Supercharged JIT Compiler Will Make Your Code Fly (Like a Bird on Red Bull)
Previous Weeks
Andreas Möller recommends:
Anton Lohvynenko explores:
Modernize PHP Legacy Apps: Challenges, Approaches, Cases Studies
Laravel News examines the:
Other
Cybersecurity/Privacy
The Hacker News reports:
Hackers Exploiting WordPress Elementor Pro Vulnerability: Millions of Sites at Risk!
Don’t use WordPress page builders, peeps!
Ars Technica reports:
Trojanized Windows and Mac apps rain down on 3CX users in massive supply chain attack
Data Center Dynamics asks:
ChatGPT: What’s a security department supposed to do?
Reuters reports:
Special Report: Tesla workers shared sensitive images recorded by customer cars
This sounds similar to douchebaggery from another company we’ve heard a lot about lately. I wonder if they have the same owner. ;)
More
Infoworld reports:
Visual Studio Code 1.77 previews GitHub Copilot chat
David Gewirtz shares:
Okay, so ChatGPT just debugged my code. For real.
Pay attention to the details in this interesting article.
My favorite Medium writer, Jason Knight has:
Improper HTML: Bad Examples Makes For Bad Developers
Chrome looks at:
Smooth and simple transitions with the View Transitions API
I am thrilled to see this, as it will eliminate lots of horseshit JavaScript.
Percona shares:
MySQL 5.7 Upgrade Issue: Reserved Words
DevCollaborative looks at:
Choosing the Right Analytics Tool For Your Nonprofit Website
Important stuff, and fuck Google.
Fediverse
Since Twitter is single-handedly exploding growth in the Fediverse, we’ll start with it (again).
The Verge states the obvious:
Elon Musk’s obsession with blue checks is a verified problem
Mashable reports on the predictable result:
Twitter failed to scare legacy verified accounts into paying for Twitter Blue
NPR reports:
Twitter labels NPR's account as 'state-affiliated media,' which is untrue
It’s a lie, and CuntEO Space Karen knows it’s a lie.
The Fediverse Report is:
Talking Fediverse at FediForum
Mike Stone shares:
If you want to see someone’s (like us [https://phpc.social/@symfonystation.rss](https://phpc.social/@symfonystation.rss)) Mastodon posts without joining Mastodon, this is for you. You can also follow hashtags in your RSS reader.
This is an academic paper from Robert Gehl on:
The digital covenant: non-centralized platform governance on the Mastodon social network
Kevin Quirk shares how he switched from Miro.blog to WordPress to make:
a self-hosted micro blog that also works with the Fediverse
The Verge reports on:
The sudden death and rebirth of Tweetbot as a Mastodon App
CTAs (aka show us some free love)
- That’s it for this week. Please share this communiqué.
- Also, be sure to join our newsletter list at the bottom of our site’s pages. Joining gets you each week's communiqué in your inbox (a day early).
- Follow us on Flipboard or at [@symfonystation@phpc.social](https://phpc.social/web/@symfonystation) on Mastodon for daily coverage. Consider joining the @phpc.social instance. If this communique is a little overwhelming, you can get a condensed weekly news highlight post on Friendica.
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.
Keep coding Symfonistas!
You can find a vast array of curated evergreen content.
Author
Reuben Walker
Founder
Symfony Station