Symfony Station Communiqué – Stardate: ✦ 22 August 2025 ✦: The Latest Symfony, Drupal, TYPO3, and PHP News!

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Reuben Walker, Jr.

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.

• 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. Fuck 'em!

As noted last week, I am willing to spend 10 hours of my retirement each week on The Programmer’s Fulcrum. It's the future (and smaller) home for a fusion of Symfony Station and Battalion. Its tagline is Devs Defending Democracy.

You can sign up now and for 2025 get an email with links to and featured articles for each week's Symfony Station Communiqué and Battalion "Destroying Autocracy" post. And you’ll be set with TPF after the fusing. I appreciate all of you.

Symfony

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

This week, development activity mostly focused on dealing with the deprecation of sleep/wakeup methods in PHP 8.5 and their replacement by serialize/unserialize methods. In addition, we published more details about the unconference track at the SymfonyCon Amsterdam 2025 conference and a Symfony AI Hackathon on September 12, 2025.

August 11–17, 2025: A Week of Symfony 972

They also have:

Let’s build the Symfony AI ecosystem together

Uhm, non.

Featured Item

Justin Searls writes:

Generative AI is all anyone can talk about. It has rendered entire product categories obsolete and upended the job market. With any economic change of this magnitude, there are bound to be winners and losers. So far, it sure looks like full-breadth developers—people with both technical and product capabilities—stand to gain as clear winners.

What makes me so sure? Because over the past few months, the engineers I know with a lick of product or business sense have been absolutely scorching through backlogs at a dizzying pace. It may not map to any particular splashy innovation or announcement, but everyone agrees generative coding tools crossed a significant capability threshold recently.

Full-breadth Developers

If you have read our communiques before, you know we are anti-AI (for moral reasons). But, when there is a rare reasoned alternate take we are happy to share it.

This Week

Janali Solanki explores:

From Triggers to Doctrine Events — Building a Future-Proof Logging System in Symfony

Browsely examines:

Pivoting from Auth0 to PHP Symfony

How Tos

Lubna Altungi looks at:

Symfony Translation: Step by Step Guide

LaurentMN explores:

Mocking Dependencies and Running Strong Integration Tests in Symfony

e-Commerce

Centarro asks:

What makes a good Drupal Commerce developer?

Sylius announces:

SXO in e-commerce: How to boost sales through better user experiences

CMSs

Sulu has:

Sulu Release 2.5.27 / 2.6.11 and 3.0.0-alpha5

Joomla has:

Joomla Community Magazine

Highlights include:

Joomla Milestones: 2005-2025

How Joomla Volunteers Built a Digital Relief Center After Hurricane Katrina

And:

Joomla Group 1 Elections - Results of Treasurer and Vice President 2025

Joomla! 6.0 Beta 1 - Feature Freeze! See what made it.

TYPO3 has:

TYPO3 v14 Code Sprint

Case study: LIV partners with F7 for a modern TYPO3 communications platform

Localization Team Update: New Languages, Team Growth, and Future Plans

Bringing Czech to TYPO3: My Translation Journey

Wolfgang Wagner shares a review:

TYPO3 Developer Days 2025: Erfahrungsbericht & Insights

Drupal has:

Take Part in the 2025 Drupal Business Survey

Its founder, Dries Buyaert has:

Switching to Markdown after 20 years of HTML

I also switched to Markdown last year. Luckily HTML can mix with Markdown in Grav CMS without a extra module.

Installing and configuring Markdown Easy for Drupal

Jofitz examines the:

Drush generate plugin:manager walk-through

Vardot has:

Securing Drupal Commerce: The Role of a Content Security Policy in Payment Compliance

Component-Based Design in Drupal

Good stuff.

Speaking of, DrupalEasy announces:

Announcing a new multi-day DrupalEasy class: Professional Single Directory Components

Drupal contrib module Markdown Easy 2.0.0 - new features, simpler setup!

Capellic shares:

AI Bot Abuse: Our Evolving Strategy for Taming Performance Nightmares on Drupal Faceted Search Pages

Useful. And remember every time you use AI, you are fucking over some of your fellow humans and the planet.

Gbyte shows us:

How to Detect Entity Changes in Drupal the Right Way

John Picozzi has a review:

Recap: My Return to Drupal GovCon 2025!

Smartbees shows us:

How To Create an Image Gallery in Drupal

Previous Weeks

Loïc Faugeron shares:

My Symfony Makefile

Martin Micka has:

Symfony in Review: My Opinion on Recent Developer Experience Updates

PHP

This Week

Antonio Silva introduces:

PHPUnit Course - Module 1: Introduction to PHPUnit and the World of Testing

Tideways asks:

What are compiler optimized internal PHP functions and should you import them via use statement?

Previous Weeks

Norbert Tech looks at:

Data Analytics in Distributed Transactional Systems

Entwickler asks:

Was ist heute wichtig für den produktiven Einsatz von PHP?

More Programming

The Register reports:

AI crawlers and fetchers are blowing up websites, with Meta and OpenAI the worst offenders

Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis tarpit

DarkReading reports:

10 Major GitHub Risk Vectors Hidden in Plain Sight

Tihomir Manushev explores:

Safe Math, Clean Data: Mastering NULLIF in Postgres

YCombinator features an interesting tool:

OverType – A Markdown WYSIWYG editor that's just a textarea

Andrew Benbow examines:

Lazy Loading CSS Background Images

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.

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 Guardian reports:

Microsoft workers occupy HQ in protest against company’s ties to Israeli military

The Association of Progressive Communications reports:

Brazil explores ways to hold platforms accountable in court and beyond

The Evil Empire Strikes Back

TechCrunch reports:

Judge says FTC investigation into Media Matters ‘should alarm all Americans’
Wok reports:

Google is killing the open web

Cybersecurity and Privacy

BleepingComputer reports:

Okta open-sources catalog of Auth0 rules for threat detection

Did you see the Symfony article above?

Socket reports:

Researcher Exposes Zero-Day Clickjacking Vulnerabilities in Major Password Managers

Fediverse

Hamish Campbell explains:

Why Most Fediverse Codebases Are Languishing

The London School of Economics asks:

Are newsletters the new academic social media?

Niche, but interesting.

Other Slightly Federated Social Media

Kuba Suder shares an:

Introduction to AT Protocol

Connected Places has:

ATmosphere Report – 130

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Reuben Walker, Jr.