In a recent post to his site Matthias Noback looks at what he sees as the future of packages in PHP including some thoughts about the offerings on PHPClasses.org and the rise of Composer/Packagist.

When you ask me: what is the reason for a PHP developer to write classes? I answer: in order to separate responsibilities and hide data. Many principles have been devised to help developers fulfilling these tasks. But in most cases there was no sign of these principles underlying the code on phpclasses.org. This is why many people have turned their back on phpclasses.org. I was about to do the same. But in response to my tweet some people, including Manuel Lemos, responded that everybody needs a place to learn and try.

He looked a bit more into the PHPClasses site and found some new features not known about (including Composer support). He points out some issues with their approach about publishing packages and how they're released. He contrasts this with how Packagist.org handles the Composer information and package statistics. He looks at some recommended ways to judge the quality of packages and mentions a new book he's writing to help PHP developers create better, more useful (and flexible) packages.