In the latest episode of Voices of the ElePHPant podcast host Cal Evans interviews another member of the PHP community: Jordi Boggiano, a speaker at this year's Lone Star PHP and one of the primary developers on the Composer project.

They talk about why Jordi initially decided to work on the project. He talks about how it originated from the need for a plugin/bundle installer on projects they were working on. They talk about how it has changed the way PHP developers code on a pretty fundamental level. They also talk about the new features that were coming to Composer (when the episode was recorded).

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly and listen at your leisure. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter to get information on the latest episodes as they're released.

The Three Devs & A Maybe podcast has posted a new episode (#70) featuring Composer and Jordi Boggiano, the creator and lead developer on the project.

This week we are joined by Jordi Boggiano, Composer (Dependency Manager for PHP) lead and Symfony2 core developer. We begin discussion with how he got into software development, touching on his involvement with Symfony2 before its official release. This topic leads us on to chat about why Composer was developed and how much it has grown in popularity. Jordi then discusses some of the changes he would make if he had the chance, along with what the Toran Proxy is. Finally, we discuss Composer performance and the popular Monolog package that he has developed.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 of the show. If you enjoy the episode, be sure to subscribe to their feed or follow them on Twitter to get the info on the latest episodes as they're released.

On the Acquia blog there's a new post today with another of Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire's interviews with a member of the PHP community. In this latest interview he talks with Jordi Boggiano, a lead developer on the Composer project that's changed the way people use and install PHP packages.

It was great to get the chance to sit down and talk with Jordi Boggiano at SymfonyCon Madrid 2014. Jordi is responsible for Composer, one of the most important pieces of technology that is driving PHP interoperability and the PHP "renaissance" of the last couple of years. He's also on the Symfony2 core team.

Jeffrey gives a brief overview of some of the main points that Jordi makes in his interview including the suggestion of "using what you know" and thinking of the people/users of the tool, not just the technology of it. He also mentions Jordi's response to the "PHP Renaissance" (and note that he sees it as more of a PHP Reset instead). You can watch the full interview video either through the embedded player or on YouTube, You can also use the in-page audio player or download the mp3 if you'd like an audio-only version.

Jordi Boggiano has a new post today sharing some of his own insights about PHP version adoption but, unlike some of the raw numbers shared before, his perspective comes from aggregating data from Packagist.

Pascal's number are interesting but I believe they have a bias towards older PHP versions. I would argue that people configuring their servers properly are also those that tend to keep up to date with newer versions, and part of the best practices is to avoid publishing the software versions you are using (i.e. disable expose_php in php.ini). If I am correct here that means early adopters are mis-represented in those numbers. In any case, I do have another biased dataset to present so here it comes! I looked in the packagist.org logs of the last fifty days for GET /packages.json which represents a composer update done by someone.

He notes that the data is biased towards development machines (not always running the same version as their production counterparts) but that it shouldn't skew the numbers too much. He compares two different datasets, one from November 2013 and the other from November 2014, showing a major change in the overall numbers and moving the largest version used up from 5.3.10 to 5.5.9. He also shares some interesting statistics around the requirements developers are putting on Packagist packages...that have basically remained the same over the past year (sadly).