Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the Composer has posted about some of the new Composer patterns that have been introduced into the tool this year, including some you might not even have realized.

Here is a short update on some nice little features that have become available in the last year in Composer.

He includes five of these features in his list (but something tells me these are just some of the more user-facing improvements the project has introduced):

• Checking dependencies for bad patterns
• Referencing scripts to avoid duplication
• Defining your target production environment in composer.json
• Excluding paths from the optimized classmap
• Requiring packages easily and safely

For each item he includes the command (and sometimes optional arguments) that make it work and what kind of results you can expect. There's definitely some handy features in here and not just for the "power users" in the crowd.