Symfony Station Communiqué — 28 March 2025 — A look at Symfony, Drupal, PHP, and other programming news!

This communiqué 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.

Or jump straight to your favorite section via our website. 

• Symfony Universe
• PHP
• More Programming
• Defending Democracy
• Cybersecurity
• Fediverse

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.

Symfony

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> This week, the upcoming Symfony 7.3 version updated its default configuration to exclude container extensions, entities and messenger messages when registering services, and made some changes related to resetting services. In addition, Symfony celebrated the SymfonyDay Chicago 2025 conference with great success.

March 17–23, 2025 A Week of Symfony #951

They also have:

A newsletter

New Core Team Member, Symfony CLI

SymfonyLive Berlin 2025 starts in a week!

Upsun has:

Decouple your Symfony frontend using Next.js

Nothing personal but just FYI, when you use AI generated images it makes you look unprofessional, incompetent, and uncool.

SensiLabs has:

Symfony and AI: the video is now available

Featured Item

SensioLabs writes:

2025 is going to be a big year for anniversaries. We will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Symfony, the 30th anniversary of PHP, the 25th anniversary of AFUP and the 10th anniversary of API Platform. For SensioLabs, this is a major milestone that proves the longevity of the technologies in our ecosystem. We are proud to celebrate these anniversaries with the community all year long.

2025: a year of anniversaries for PHP, AFUP, Symfony and API Platform

This Week

Thierry Feuzeu has:

Using service facades in a Symfony application — part 1

Using service facades in a Symfony application — part 2

Andrew Markhai shows us:

How Symfony Flex Works

Roman Huliak has:

PHP Dependency Injection: Best Practices, Real Examples, and Symfony Implementation

Using Immutable Types in PHP

Tideways announces:

Tideways 2025.1 Release

Storyblok announces:

Storyblok unveils new PHP packages in collaboration with SensioLabs

Great stuff.

Kévin Dunglas shows us how to:

Develop faster with FrankenPHP

How To

LaurentMN has:

Advanced Comparison: PHP-CS-Fixer vs PHPStan in Symfony Projects — Which One Do You Need?

Advanced Use of Elasticsearch in Your Dockerized Symfony Project

Optimizing Real-Time Communication in Symfony: Advanced Mercure Integration Strategies

Mastering FrankenPHP in Symfony: Advanced Integration, Performance Boosts, and Real-World Deployments

Mayur Koshti has:

Database Abstraction (DBAL) in Symfony: A Deep Dive

Other

Mautic announces:

Mautic 6.0: Orion Edition is released

eCommerce

Shopware has:

Shopware 6.7 Release Candidate 1 – now available

Stefan Pilz shares:

Things I Wish I Knew Before Building My First Shopware Plugin

BitExpert explores:

Extending a Twig Component in Sylius 2.0

Centarro has an introduction:

Meet Commerce Kickstart 5.0, the first contrib site template

I'm preparing to launch a eCommerce site to sell my worldly possesions before I retire to Europe. PrestaShop is currently my choice, but I will check this out.

CMSs

TYPO3 has:

HOPPECKE Introduces B2B Portal to Improve Automation and User Experience

2024 in Review: The TYPO3 Localization Team’s Year of Progress

Pluswerk shares a review:

TYPO3 Camp Central Germany 2025

Drupal has:

DrupalPod + Drupal Forge

It's good to see this becoming more official.

DrupalCon Unveils Collaboration with SixEleven for a Bold New Look

Update to releases on project pages

Wim Leers shares:

Experience Builder: XB at DrupalCon Atlanta 2025

Evolving Web examines:

DrupalCon 2025 Atlanta: DriesNote Highlights and What’s Next for Drupal CMS

Good to see there will be a code editor in Experience Builder for custom Drupal blocks.

Droptica has:

How to Build an Inclusive Website? Drupal Accessibility Tips and Tricks

How to Convince the Board to Choose Drupal? Seven Business and Financial Arguments

Drupal Mountain Camp has a:

Drupal Mountain Camp 2025 Wrap-Up

Specbee looks at:

SmartLinker AI for Drupal: An AI-powered internal linking tool for smarter content

I can see this for very large sites.

Morpht explores:

Enhancing your theme with dynamic colour palettes in a Drupal theme

Metadrop introduces:

VLSuite: web pages in record time

Just wait till Drupal CMS has Experience Builder built in. Or use regular Drual with the Gutenberg editor now.

Drunomics explains:

Why we don't use GraphQL

Evolving Web shares:

What I Wish I Knew When Starting with Drupal

MongoDB shows us:

How to Run Drupal on MongoDB

The DropTimes shares:

The Ultimate List of Contributed Modules in Drupal CMS by Functionality

Capellic has:

Lightweight and High Performance Drupal Themes with Modern Tools

This takes a similar approach as Symfony UX. Interesting but still too complicated. Plus it uses Failwind CSS.

Previous

Mickael Bordage examines:

Building a RAG-Powered AI with Symfony and Elasticsearch

My Florida DrupalCamp buddy, Carlos Ospina has:

Rebuilding Drupal's Ecosystem Pyramid: A Path to Sustainable Growth

Creating Real Business Value: Transforming Drupal.org into a Genuine Business Hub

Chen Hui Jing shares:

The case for “old school” CSS in custom Drupal Themes

Oscar Calvo explains:

Migraciones en Drupal

PHP

This Week

Laravel News shows us how to:

Create Self-Contained PHP Executables with PHPacker

David Duymelinck looks at:

Moving from ORM models to Domain Driven Design aggregates

Takeshi Yu explores:

Composer Linker: The npm link for PHP Developers

Roman Huliak finishes a series:

Boost Your PHP Performance: A General Overview of Faster Function Alternatives (Part 4/4)

Antonio Silva looks at:

PHP PSRs : PSR-4 Autoloader

Derick Rethans explores:

Unicode Collation Sorting

Jhonatan Morais continues a series:

How to start using gRPC with PHP - Part 3/4

Inspector has:

AI Agents in PHP with MCP (Model Context Protocol)

Elminson De Oleo Baez examines:

Trait and Classes Hacking: Customizing Package Libraries with PHP Traits and Classes

Dagger X announces:

Security Redefined: Introducing DaggerX V3.0.0 for Unbreakable PHP Protection

Zend looks at:

PHP Vulnerabilities: Assessment, Prevention, and Mitigation

Nicolas Perussel takes:

Deep dive into the Zend Memory Manager: Understanding PHP’s Internal Memory Management

Roberto Butti shows us how to:

Efficiently handle large datasets, huge files and data streams with PHP generators

More Programming

TetraLogical explores:

Understanding the European Accessibility Act (EAA)

Tihomir Manushev show us how to:

Replace Redis with PostgreSQL

Lorna Jane examines:

Right-Size Your RESTful API: More Flexibility Without GraphQL

Terence Eden shows us how to:

Create a Table of Contents based on HTML Heading Elements

CSS Tricks says:

Support Logical Shorthands in CSS

BleepingComputer reports:

Infostealer campaign compromises 10 npm packages, targets devs

Fighting for Democracy (sponsored by Battalion

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. Or even Bluesky if that floats your boat.

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 and other douchebaggery

In news sure to make Cory Doctorow happy, Tech Policy reports:

Interoperability in the EU: A Judgment Opens the Door

The Register reports:

OTF, which backs Tor, Let's Encrypt and more, sues to save funding from Trump cuts

Wired reports:

How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services—and Why You Might Want To

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

The Verge asks:

Is it safe to travel with your phone right now?

It's not safe to travel to the U.S. period. Or even within it by air.

MIT Technology Review reports:

Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake

Cybersecurity/Privacy

404 Media reports:

When Your Threat Model Is Being a Moron

You Need to Use Signal's Nickname Feature

The Verge reports:

Vivaldi bundles Proton VPN into its web browser

Fediverse

The Fediverse Report has:

Fediverse Report – #109

Fedihost has some how to videos:

Creating A GoToSocial Instance on FediHost

Configuring A PeerTube Instance

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

The Fediverse Report has:

ATmosphere Report – 2025march.b

TechCrunch reports:

A world without Caesars: How the ATProto community is rebuilding the web to return power to the people

Hmm. Are they really?

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

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Author

Reuben Walker

Founder
Symfony Station