On the Symfony Finland site they've post together a post sharing some benchmark results of Symfony on PHP 7.0 versus 7.1, the most recent major release of the PHP language with some improvements of its own.

PHP 7.1 was launched on December 1st 2016. This was the first minor release after the release of 7.0 a year ago. PHP 7.0 was a revolutionary product, especially when it comes to memory usage and performance. PHP 7.1 is a more modest upgrade that brings new features and improved performance. But how much has performance improved from a year back?

The benchmarking uses the eZ Platform demo running a full CMS similar to the previous benchmarking done in 2015. The checks were run using:

• a "clean" environment (no caching, PHP-FPM just restarted and no APC cache)
• standard requests running in development mode
• more requests but this time in production mode

The post shares the results with a few graphs showing them in terms of response time for both sequential and concurrent page requests.

On the Symfony Finland blog there's a tutorial posted showing how to translate Drupal 8 configurations into ones for eZ Platform using a bit of code inside a Symfony command.

Bolt CMS, Drupal 8 and eZ Platform all content management systems that use Symfony in one form or another. All of them use YAML to store configurations of content types and other system properties. This is great as it makes transferring between different formats quite straightforward.

This could be done by hand, but ideally configurations can be converted programatically. In this article we'll take a look at how to transfer content types from Drupal 8 to eZ Platform using a standard Symfony Command.

He starts with some background about the two configuration types (Drupal 8 and eZ Platform) before getting to the actual code to make the transformation. The code translates the Drupal 8 configurations over to the Kaliop Migrations format that can then be used in various environments. They include an example of the resulting configuration structure and, finally, the code to make the translation (allowing for multiple object types too).

On the Symfony Finland blog there's a post that talks about Symfony controllers and services and how making the controllers services instead could be beneficial.

Controllers are quite straightforward in their actions (ha-ha) and simply take requests and return responses. The concept of a services is simple too, it's technically just a PHP object that performs a task over and over again somewhere in your application.

[...] Using services for tasks repeating in multiple locations of your application undoubtedly makes sense, but why should you shrinkwrap your controllers into a service? If you look at the official Symfony Demo Application does not do this. So why should yours?

Once again he uses the eZ Platform software to illustrate the point, describing how it packages up the controllers into services, including the configuration required to make it work. He shows how the dependency injection works and how controllers/services can call actions in other controllers/services easily.

On the Symfony Finland blog Jani Tarvainen has written up a new post sharing some of the things that eZ Platform adds to Symfony and what kind of functionality it brings with it on top of the usual Symfony featureset.

eZ Platform is a Content Management System built with the Symfony Full Stack framework. While this may be clear to developers who have worked with, it maybe somewhat vague for the unitiated, especially when compared with Concrete5 or Drupal, which have adopted Symfony components into their core. [...] The relationship between Symfony and eZ Platform is very similar to Expression Engine using Code Igniter or EPiServer using ASP.NET MVC.

He then goes on to talk about the things Symfony includes by default including the request/response structure, internationalization handling and Twig integration. From there he lists out the things that the eZ Platform adds on top of the standard Symfony including:

• a content repository
• dynamic routing
• a user interface
• user and permission management

He ends the post with a look at some of the other bundles and features eZ Platform also provides around HTTP caching, image manipulation and more.

The Symfony Finland blog site has worked up some benchmarks comparing the Symfony Proxy versus Varnish and shared the results in this new post. The Symfony Proxy is a tool built in to the framework to help with caching responses automatically. Varnish, however, is a separate tool optimized to handle the caching of the same content but outside of the application completely.

In the previous articles we have evaluated PHP performance on different runtimes (PHP 5.6, HHVM, PHP 7) as well as how it behaves when adding server resources (CPU & RAM) using eZ Platform - a CMS built on the Symfony Framework.

In production environments Symfony and eZ Platform are likely ran behind the Varnish Reverse Proxy, which we'll evaluate next by comparing it to the built in Symfony Proxy.

They once again use the eZ platform demo application as the software under test on an 8 Core machine. The results aren't overly surprising if you're familiar with Varnish at all. Software-based caching layers are helpful but when you are able to remove the processing overhead of it from an application, you're better off.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post about getting eZ platform set up and running on a Vagrant VM relatively painlessly. eZ Publish (and the newer eZ Platform) are a content management system aimed at the digital marketing space.

Last year, I had a somewhat negative experience with installing eZ Publish on a Vagrant box. Since then, they’ve significantly improved both the software and the VM-friendliness by, well, flat out removing the legacy stack. The VM setup we’ll be using in this tutorial comes from the labs of NetGen and the mind of @vranac, and is followed by the installation procedure on our very own Homestead Improved modified by yours truly.

Author Bruno Skvorc walks you through the entire process, using Vranac (Vagrant, Anisble and VirtualBox) to get the VM instance set up and running. He then shows how to clone the latest eZ installation and build the demo application. He follows this with the instructions on getting the same setup running on a Homestead Improved instance, requiring a few more steps but it can be a bit faster overall. He finishes off the post by mentioning an upcoming event, PHPSummerCamp, a conference that will include sessions and in-depth looks at the eZ Publish and Platform functionality (happening in Croatia in August).