Several migration frameworks and libraries have been created over the years in order to help developers manage their data and schema changes in a reliable, collaborative manner. But even well-adopted solutions like Phinx and Doctrine Migrations have either struggled to keep-up with modern PHP due to architectural issues, or failed to provide enough framework integration to be actually practical for everyday use.

In this talk I'll guide you through Baleen: an open-source PHP framework that synthesizes the very core of the migrations mechanism into a “domain library”, which can be re-used to power migrations for virtually any modern PHP framework (not kidding!). I'll also reveal plans of re-building Doctrine Migrations using the Baleen framework. But most importantly, you'll see an example of how separating common logic into small domain models can help you invent and contribute relevant modules to the open-source community.