This post originally appeared on Symfony Station.
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.
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!
Symfony
As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.
This week, the upcoming Symfony 7.4 version improved the Serializer component by adding more prefix support to the accessor, added more code to make the JsonPath component RFC compliant, and added support for loading JSON using imports in AssetMapper.
July 14–20, 2025: A Week of Symfony #968
Good news on the Asset Mapper.
They also have:
SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025 Community Evening - Let’s Celebrate 20 Years of Symfony Together!
SensioLabs shows us:
How To Prioritize Messages When Building Asynchronous Applications With Symfony Messenger
SymfonyCasts has:
Featured Item
Uwe Friedrichsen concludes a fucking fantastic series.
He ends with:
So, is it time to finally submit to cynicism?
"I do not think so. Even if I do not cherish any illusion when it comes to the forces that dominate our industry, I dislike cynicism. It is a very destructive emotion that eventually paralyses you and cripples your mind."
Channeling Depeche Mode, he writes:
"I cannot change the world,
but I can provide ideas how to do things better,
this may change someone’s point of view,
their acting different may change someone else’s point of view.
And maybe, that spark will eventually turn into a fire – and change the world."
Thoughts on AI and software development - Part 5
Frankly this one of the best series I have ever read about programming.
This Week
Fastfony announces:
I look forward to trying this out when I finish the final large project of my career around the holidays.
How Tos
Laurent MN has:
Fix Bugs Faster: Full Sentry Integration in Symfony 7
e-Commerce
Shopware has:
Release notes Shopware 6.7.1.0
Other
Pluswerk+ announces:
PIMCORE Community Dev Days 2025: a day for Pimcore, Symfony and PHP
CMSs
Joomla has:
Highlights include:
Introducing the Joomla Health Checker: Your Website's Personal Physician
Joomla turns 20! How will you celebrate?
Joomla! 5.4.0 Alpha3 - Wrapping Up the Alpha Phase
Joomla! 6.0 Alpha3 - Help Shape the Next Generation
TYPO3 has:
Community Budget Report: Implementing Rector Rules for TYPO3 v13/v14
TYPO3 v13 Certifications Now Available – Major Update for Consultant Exam
Wolfgang Wagner shares:
TYPO3-Updates und DSGVO: Warum "läuft doch" teuer wird
Drupal has:
Marketplace Share Out #8: FAQ and What's Changing Post-Feedback
Our Social Media Focus: 2025 and Beyond
At least they are dropping Shitter. And staying on the dreadful LinkedIn unfortunately. Be sure to follow them on Mastodon or Bluesky. If you want privacy use the former. Or just follow us. ;)
Co-designing the future: Share your views on our Drupal AI roadmap
Here is mine. The day it’s opt-out (not the current opt-in) is the day Drupal gets thrown out.
Dries Buyaert explores:
AI and the great digital agency unbundling
John Picozzi examines:
Creating a Simple Donation form with Drupal, Stripe, and Webforms
Specbee looks at:
8 reasons governments around the world trust Drupal for their digital infrastructure
The DropTimes explores the:
Drupal Leaflet Choropleth Module: Create Interactive Geographic Data Maps Without Custom Code
ImageX Media explores:
Top Drupal Modules and Features for A Compelling Event Section
Golems examines:
Monitoring tools for Kubernetes: Prometheus vs Grafana vs Datadog
PHP
This Week
Grant Horwood looks at:
PHP: manipulating file pointers with fseek and ftell
David Duymelinck has:
Fishbite explores:
HTML Parsing with PHP 8.4's New DOM\HTMLDocument Class
Sticher looks back on:
Loïc Faugeron shares:
PHPUnit Best Practices (Ultimate Guide)
DDEV has:
Enhanced Security with DDEV's New ddev-hostname Binary
New GUI Installer: Get DDEV Running on Windows in Just 10 Minutes (Video)
Roman Huliak shows us:
How to Securely Handle Production Credentials in PHP (Without Exposing Them in Git)
Dragan Rapić looks at:
GB Hackers reports:
PHP PDO Flaw Allows Attackers to Inject Malicious SQL Commands
More Programming
LocalGhost has:
This page is under construction: a love letter to the personal website
DarkReading reports:
Stop AI Bot Traffic: Protecting Your Organization's Website
404 Media reports:
Hacker Plants Computer 'Wiping' Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent
ChatGPT Hallucinated a Feature, Forcing Human Developers to Add It
As if having shitty bosses isn’t enough of a curse. Now you have incompetent AI bosses as well.
Speaking of shit, Colton Volge says:
Tailwind is the Worst of All Worlds
Worse programming developments of all time:
- AI
- React
- Tailwind
Just fyi, the aim of all of these is to drive down developer wages. They're developed by clueless TechBros and brutally exploited by corporations.
The Register reports:
GitHub command palette wins stay of execution after dev pushback
Freelance dev shop Toptal caught serving malware after GitHub account break-in
Vibe coding service Replit deleted user’s production database, faked data, told fibs galore
Just desserts.
CSS Tricks has:
A First Look at the Interest Invoker API (for Hover-Triggered Popovers)
Cool. Another way to get rid of JavaScript.
Jono Anderson has:
It’s time for modern CSS to kill the SPA
This x 26,014!
Josh Comeau shares:
A Friendly Introduction to SVG
That HTML Blog explores:
More Fun with Invoker Commands and Web Components
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
BleepingComputer reports:
Ukraine arrests suspected admin of XSS Russian hacking forum
404 Media reports:
Hacker Plants Computer 'Wiping' Commands in Amazon's AI Coding Agent
Too bad they were white hat hackers.
The Evil Empire Strikes Back
Where's Your 'Ed shares:
The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble
:)
EuroNews reports:
Meta won’t sign EU’s AI Code, but who will?
Cybersecurity and Privacy
Hosting asks:
How secure is your website? Let’s check.
DarkReading reports:
Translating Cyber-Risk for the Boardroom
Fediverse
Connected Places has:
Fediverse Report – #126 July 22, 2025
We Distribute has details:
WordPress-ActivityPub v 7.1.0 Introduces Following Capabilities
Other Slightly Federated Social Media
The Register reports:
Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky's DMs isn't just a bad idea, it's the law
If you live in the shitass UK.
CTAs (aka show us some free love)
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