There’s no doubt that Composer is the way of the future for PHP, but Packagist (the package archiver) is woefully lacking in useful information. Well actually, the information is there, there just isn’t a way to get at it. For example, I was looking for an asset manager and typed in assets, and I couldn’t figure out how they were ordered… and there’s no way to reorder them.
I figured by now, someone MUST have built a user-ratings system for the packages. But after weeks of searching, I haven’t found any. So I figure I might as well start. Right now, I’ve only got a list of all the packages, and they’re ordered by descending total number of downloads: http://matu.la/packages/
It shouldn’t be too difficult to add in up and down ratings and comments. The biggest issue is getting the stats. Packagist doesn’t have an api (that I can see) that exposes the packages’ info, like tags, downloads, and such. The info I have was a quick scrape, and that’s not something I want to keep doing.
So, here are the top 10 PHP composer packages by installs:
| Package | Description | Downloads (as of 12/17/2012) |
|---|---|---|
| twig/twig | Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template language for PHP | 279,980 |
| symfony/symfony | The Symfony PHP framework | 231,115 |
| doctrine/common | Common Library for Doctrine projects | 230,744 |
| doctrine/dbal | Database Abstraction Layer | 217,669 |
| monolog/monolog | Logging for PHP 5.3 | 198,494 |
| doctrine/orm | Object-Relational-Mapper for PHP | 197,518 |
| swiftmailer/swiftmailer | Swiftmailer, free feature-rich PHP mailer | 172,327 |
| kriswallsmith/assetic | Asset Management for PHP | 166,350 |
| sensio/distribution-bundle | The base bundle for the Symfony Distributions | 149,974 |
| sensio/framework-extra-bundle | This bundle provides a way to configure your controllers with annotations | 149,437 |
@terrymatula I actually worked on that yesterday evening, deployed it now: https://t.co/CLxRmwop – popularity is based on DLs in last 5days.