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Once again, as a perk for joining our list, you receive The Payload a day earlier than the weekly Symfony Station communiqué. But still, check the site tomorrow for the latest developments.

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Welcome to this week's edition of The Payload. 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 Thursdays. So you can savor it over your weekend.

Or scroll down to your favorite section.

Once again, thanks go out to Javier Eguiluz and 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 Logo

Symfony

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

Highlight -> This week, Symfony development activity was very intense. The upcoming Symfony 7.3 version added a Slug constraint, introduced support for union types in OptionsResolver, enabled using HTTP/3 with the CurlHttpClient, and added support for invokable commands and input attributes. In addition, we published a summary of the Symfony project activity in 2024.

A Week of Symfony #941 (6-12 January 2025)

They also have:
Announcing the Symfony UX Core Team

Great news!

Featured Item

The best news in a long time came out with two announcements this week.

First in, The people should own the town square, Mastodon announced:

We are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

Meanwhile, Free our Feeds announced:

It will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.

Meanwhile the Social Web Foundation said:

The Social Web Foundation focuses on the network of platforms connected via ActivityPub. We also support efforts to make other distributed social networking protocols more open and equitable. For this reason, we are excited to support the FreeOurFeeds campaign launching today. This campaign is an opportunity to develop the capacity needed for the open social web protocols – ActivityPub along with Bluesky’s AT Protocol – to better interoperate, leveraging the entire open social ecosystem to create a working demonstration of algorithmic pluralism at scale.

Open Future summarized:

Both initiatives aim at the same problem: Ensuring that the underlying infrastructures powering social media services are run as public services that are resistant to capture from companies or individuals. They represent attempts to safeguard nascent public digital infrastructures for a new generation of social media services.

So while the Free our Feeds include some suspect AI cheerleaders and the SWF is too Meta tolerant for my tastes, I hope some fantastic things can come from these developments.

This week

Mayur Koshti explores:
Mastering Custom Console Commands in Symfony

Hugues Gobet continues a series:
Logbook of Learning Domain-Driven Design: Day 3

eCommerce

Sylius is:
Introducing the Sylius Key Contributors Program

Freelock examines:
Creating Product Bundles in Drupal Commerce

CMSs

This week we published:
How Goals It 2? An Update on last year's Website Tech Goals and what's in store for 2025

In Sulu news Roboles starts a series:
Sulu Bundle Development: Part 1

Great stuff, except for the React. ;)



TYPO3 has:
Content Blocks in TYPO3 v13 LTS — Repository Moved to FriendsOfTYPO3

TYPO3 13.4.3 and 12.4.25 security releases published

TYPO3 9.5.49, 10.4.48, and 11.5.42 ELTS Released



In Joomla news Sergey Tolkachyov has:
Joomla tip: Use the Joomla\Uri\Uri class to create a URL




Concrete CMS has:
January 2025 Concrete CMS Community Round-Up



Drupal has:
Drupal CMS 1.0 is now available!

Drupal Launches Game-Changing CMS Platform, Empowering Marketers to Create Exceptional Digital Experiences

Withdraw official presence from X/Twitter and Meta platforms

Dries Buytaert provides his take:
Drupal CMS 1.0 released

1X Internet shares:
Drupal CMS is officially launched - discover its potential today

There is a link to experiment with it here.

Specbee examines:
Unboxing Drupal CMS (and setting it up)

Erdfisch has:
Drupal CMS: Einfach. Leistungsstark. Zukunftsweisend.

Use your browser translator for this as I only have beer German. De pilsner, bitte. Danke.

Evolving Web looks at:
Why Content Editors & Marketers Will Love Drupal CMS

Drupalize Me shares:
Drupal CMS Guide Update: The Challenge of Documenting a Fast-Moving Open Source Product

Tag1 Consulting says:
Performance Testing Leads To Major Improvements for Drupal CMS — and all of Drupal

Good stuff, especially the Gander testing integration.

Tag1 Consulting explores:
Migrating Your Data from D7 to D10: Entity type conversions. From nodes to user and taxonomy terms

Varnish has a:
DrupalCon Singapore 2024 Recap

PHP logo

PHP

This week

Zend examines:
PHP 7.3 End of Life: How to Support Critical Apps

Asian Digital Hub shows us:
Why Overcomplicate? Build a Minimalist PHP Framework Without the Bloat of Laravel!

Indeed. Start with this and add individual Symfony components as you need them.

Derick Rethans looks at:
Figuring Out Foreach

Laravel News shares:
PeckPHP - A CLI tool designed to identify wording or spelling mistakes in your codebase

Andrii Ilkiv explores:
LTS as a Business: How an Old Project Can Become the Foundation for a New Business Model

Fernando Castillo shares:
Things I like about encapsulation: levels of understanding

Tomas Votruba shows us:
Alice, Nelmio, Hautelook, Faker - How to upgrade Doctrine Fixtures - Part 2

Valerio Barbera examines:
Php Base64 encode/decode — best practices and use cases

Al-Amin Islam looks at an:
Example of using Late Static Binding in PHP

Code logo

More Programming

The Spicy Web has:
Creative Strategies for Surviving the AI-pocalypse

Una Kravets explores:
Updates to the customizable select API

Damien Desfontaines shares:
Five things privacy experts know about AI

Lipp examines:
Rediscovering Web Frontend Development

CSS Tricks shows us:
How to Wait for the sibling-count() and sibling-index() Functions

Free Code Camp shows us:
How to Programmatically Highlight Text with the CSS Custom Highlight API

Sitepoint shares:
Data Structures and Algorithms (DSA): A Complete Tutorial

Whalers looks at:
Mastering Docker and Jenkins: Build Robust CI/CD Pipelines Efficiently

Battalion logo

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 pageto 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

The Verge reports:
Biden warns nation about the rise of American tech oligarchs

The Markup reports:
Fearing AI Will Take Their Jobs, Workers Plan a Long Battle Against Tech

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

The Record reports:
Russian espionage and financial theft campaigns have ramped up, Ukraine cyber agency says

CNN reports:
Jen Rubin exits Washington Post, joins Norm Eisen to launch new outlet countering ‘authoritarian threat’

But for some reason they are on fascism-friendly Substack with it.

Cybersecurity/Privacy

Tech Policy reports:
What Trump’s Return Means For Encryption

A Call for Modular Multistakeholder AI Governance: Practical Recommendations for the Upcoming AI Action Summit

Fediverse Explorer logo

The Fediverse

The Fediverse Report has:
Last Week in Fediverse – ep 99

The Social Web Foundation looks at:
Content Policy on the Social Web

Solarbird says:
Let’s all go to the EXIT

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

DailyKos previews:
The Coming Enshittification of Bluesky

Ben Werder shares:
Free Our Feeds

I have no doubt Bluesky will eventually become enshittified. Let's hope the ATProtocol won't be.

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

Do you own or work for an organization that would be interested in our promotion opportunities? 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.


Symfony Station and The Payload cover the essential news in the Symfony, PHP, and Fediverse development communities with a focus on protecting democracy. Please use the button above to make a small donation to help cover our out-of-pocket costs. Our labor is provided free of charge to support the communities we write about.

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