Rafael Dohms has posted some if his own thoughts to his site about The League of Extraordinary Packages and why he supports their efforts to bring a good solid base of curated packages to the PHP ecosystem.

“The League of Extraordinary Packages” is what I have dubbed a collective of composer packages. Its essentially a group of developers who have gathered under a single flag (or in this case a vendor name) and set standards for the packages that live there.

Why does this even matter? Well for one Packagist is an open repository, this means that it is wide open for anyone to join, from the best packages to the most ridiculous ones. Quality control is not one of its roles and quality checking is on average 2-3 clicks per package away.

He talks about the quality control measures The League has in place to only contain good, well-tested and solid PHP packages. He also lists a few of his main reasons for supporting the effort including the fact that it reduces author fragility and provides an extended reach for those packages to reach a wider audience.

I really enjoy the work being done by The League, or The PHPLeague, or Pleague as I prefer to call it. I think it has provided us with some very good packages and given us all something to strive for. Maybe more collectives is what we need.

In his latest post Phil Sturgeon talks about a project that's been running for a while, the The League of Extraordinary Packages and aims to clear up some recent misconceptions about the group and what they strive for in the projects they endorse.

This is the story of group of friends, who decided to write some code, but somehow confused and angered everyone with a keyboard. [...] Where should I release this code [I was super excited about releasing]? Should I release it with a vendor name of Sturgeon? That seemed rather egotistical. I could make something up, but what is the point of a single vendor with a single package? I wondered if any of my buddies were having this problem. [...] Being as hungover as I was, I thought long and hard, for about 5 seconds until something amazing happened in my brain... The PHP Super Best Friends Club! The guys loved it, and we started making plans immediately.

He goes on to talk about The League and some of the goals of the organization including the stated desire for quality code and a constant stream of work on the project (no abandoned or stale projects). He talks about how some of the rules for inclusion were created and some of the members of the various projects it includes. He then gets to the "recent misunderstanding" part of things with the clash of the League and the PHP-FIG (see here). He clears up some of the confusion in that thread by stating that:

• League != PHPClasses
• League != PEAR

He finishes off the post talking some about the leadership of the group (hint: it's an organization, not really run by a person or persons) and some of the work he's doing to ensure the future of the League and the packages it includes.

A new site has started up that's trying to provide a listing of the "highest quality packages" out there for PHP based on PHP-FIG standards and good practices - the League of Extraordinary Packages.

The League of Extraordinary Packages has one driving mission, to track down and develop PHP packages of the highest quality possible, using modern tools, standards and practices to distribute, test and strengthen the code.

Members of The League follow the standards put forward by the PHP-FIG, follow the best practices detailed by PHP The Right Way and distribute all code through Composer.

So far there's a few on the list, but it promises to grow quickly. Libraries already included are things like Geotools, oauth2-client and statsd.