I’ve been on sabbatical, more or less, for the last year or so, and part of that time has been spent, as planned, on updating my skills. I’ve been using PHP for a long long time, and for a good number of years I was simply too busy with client work to worry about new software which I could use.

But now I’ve been able to spend a bit of time looking around, with my head out of the mines of productivity and value-adding, and into the sunny uploads of what if and why not. And there are some really good PHP packages out there.

Finding them was not so easy.

My finding were

  • PHP weekly has an archive here which I would recommend you just work through in reverse chronological order. This was by far the best way of finding good quality packages. There was some rubbish there too, but it was through this I found Filament which looks amazing.
  • LLMs. i.e. Chat GPT and the like. These can be out of date, but if you want to search for something that does something you can describe the behaviour and get some good choices to check out. It can also teach you the standard terms for the thing it is you wan’t to learn about .
  • Google - no only joking. This didn’t seem to help at all.
  • Git hub - no again, I didn’t find packages through this method.
  • Packagist - this wasn’t much help either. Often the projects that are good consist of multiple packages, so just looking at the “popular” ones here means you end up seeing a load of very specific smaller packages that are popular because they are included by larger things, such as Symfony or Laravel.

So it’s not easy actually. So hopefully PHPWeekly will be around for a bit.