On the KnpLabs blog there's a new post from Ryan Weaver sharing some cool things you can do with Composer you might not have known about when managing your application's dependencies.

For those of you that are comfortable with Composer, I wanted to talk about a few lesser-known, but really fantastic features. These are inspired by real questions I've heard while running around the country doing my one-man composer-and-dancing show (i.e. conference talks).

He shares four of them with a fifth that's more of an "upcoming feature" than a current one:

• Autoloading & Performance: "I thought class maps were the fastest?"
• Running Post-Deploy Scripts
• "What if I need to fork a library?"
• Can I host private packages on Packagist?
• What about signing the authenticity of Packages?

That last one about package signing is still on the known issues list and is under discussion, but no doubt that future versions of the tool will support it.