Marcel Pociot has written up a post to finish out 2017 and provide a year in review for the community and language via some Github statistics.

It's this time of the year again - the end of the year is coming up fast, so why not step back and take a look at what we, as a PHP community, have achieved this year?

For these statistics, I used the free GitHub Archive data in combination with Google BigQuery, which lets you process 1TB of data per month free of charge.

So let's take a look at some numbers

He first breaks it up into three main categories:

• most starred PHP repositories
• most starred new PHP repositories
• most contributed PHP repositories

From there he "digs deeper" and looks at the packages requiring the most dependencies and graphs the frameworks according to how many dependencies they require to install.

The Symfony blog has posted their wrap up of the activities around the project and its ecosystem in 2016. They cover releases made, events/conferences and updates on both components and documentation changes.

The beginning of a new year is the best moment to review all that happened during the previous year. These are some of the highlights of the 2016 year for the Symfony Project.

[...] 2016 was the best year in Symfony Project's history. 2017 will be even better and it will bring us new projects such as "Symfony Flex" (a new way to manage Symfony applications unveiled during the SymfonyCon Berlin 2016 conference), 1 billion downloads for Symfony Components (if the download rate keeps growing) and the return of the Symfony conferences to the United States (San Francisco, October 19-20).

Each of the sections talks about the changes over the last year and links to other resources, profiles and documentation about the update. This also includes the top contributors to the framework, new contributors and top documentation contributors.

The Symfony blog has another in their "2014 Year in Review" series posted, this time with a focus on the London Symfony meetups and the presentations that were made.

2014 was a really successful year for the Symfony Meetup Group in London. I've been involved helping to organize these meetups for a few years now, but it was never a regular thing until this year. With a huge help of my SensioLabs UK colleagues we managed to bring the group to the next level. Each meetup we're getting around 60-90 attendees, which is a big improvement compared to the previous years. We also started recording the talks. Since the Symfony community in London is much bigger, I believe we can do even better in 2015!

Talks presented this year included:

• Optimizing Your Front End Workflow
• Applying Domain Driven Design with Symfony2 projects
• Silex saved me from my legacy code
• Scaling Symfony2 apps with RabbitMQ
• Speed up your Symfony2 application and build awesome features with Redis

Each topic has a summary, a link to the slides and a video of the presentation (if available).

The Symfony blog has posted an update from the perspective of the documentation for the framework. Their "year in review" includes details for each section and the updates made.

2014 has been the busiest year in the entire history of the Symfony Documentation thanks to the amazing work of our documentation managers (Ryan Weaver, Christian Flothmann and Wouter De Jong) and the hundreds of documentation contributors.

They also talk about the best practices book, the new quick tour and Fabien Potencier's own How to Create Your Own Framework series. Among the list of their top ten most popular pages are the docs for:

• Databases and Doctrine
• Installing and Configuring Symfony
• Security
• Validation

Check out the full post for the rest of the list and what changes were made in each section.

On the Inviqa Tech Blog Ben Longden has posted a Year in Review of PHP and the community, including some of the major trends that came into their own last year (2012).

Another year has passed, and yet again we find ourselves reflecting on what has happened in the world of PHP over the past year. Let's take a moment to look back over our 2012 predictions and see how close we were!

Trends and technologies mentioned in the retrospective include:

• Framework Convergence
• Serious Caching
• Composer
• Best Practices
• PHP Closures

Their "look ahead" predictions to what's coming in 2013 include things like an emphasis on content as a service, improvements to dependency injection containers and a push for BDD testing with PHPSpec and Behat.

In this new post Lee Blue has gone through and compared Ruby and PHP in a "year end review" of their current statuses and what each of them have to offer:

Now that I’ve been working with Ruby in much more depth and both PHP and Ruby have matured dramatically over the past five years it is time to reevaluate the comparison. The previous article was primarily centered around the languages themselves and was not a showdown between any particular frameworks. In this review we will touch a bit more on frameworks, but in the context of a high level review of the two different landscapes of PHP vs Ruby for web development. We will not be getting down to feature-by-feature detail.

He talks a bit about the history and purpose of each of the languages and a good bit about the web frameworks that are available for each (hint: the PHP options are quite a bit more). He also talks about web hosting vs web application hosting and then compares the two languages with a "score card".

The bottom line, as always, is pick the solution that is right for you and your development team. My hope is that this article was helpful in shedding some light on the strengths of both PHP and Ruby, spreading the word about what is available to both languages, and helping you decide what is right for your next project.

On the Ibuildings blog today there's a year in review post (from Ben Longden, Rowan Merewood and Alistair Stead) looking back at 2011 and everything that happened in the world of PHP.

2011 has flown by in a blur as we have been busy helping many new clients with large scale PHP projects - proof that PHP continues to gain traction with enterprise. [...] The ongoing financial climate only adds pressure for IT managers to cut costs and deliver more value from their existing infrastructure and therefore require enterprises to re-consider any prior aversion to open source and PHP. This is allowing our industry to consistently buck the trend of the markets and expand to support the increased demand.

They list some of the changes in PHP itself, like the Release Candidates for PHP 5.4 and the 5.3 requirements of some frameworks, as well as some community-related changes: Facebook's Virtual PHP Machine (hhvm) and the number of PHP-related events in Europe and the UK. They mention some projects that become more prominent in 2011 including BDD testing, Platform as a Service products and the EBay acquisition of Magento.

Also included in the post are a few predictions for 2012 including a possible merging of frameworks along similar strategies, the increased use of dependency injection containers and a serious look into caching in PHP applications.