• Francois Zaninotto
• 10 months ago
• 30

Today is the second birthday of symfony. Two years ago, on October 18, 2005, the symfony-project.com website launched. One day after, we published our first blog post. It said:

This is a great day. We are all very excited that symfony is at last shown to the public. After months of development and tests, it is finally time to deliver it to the community of web developers.

Back then, the future of a new open-source MVC framework written in PHP5 was uncertain. Even if we were very confident that our code and documentation quality could make a difference, we were not the first ones to do that , and we knew that it would require a tremendous amount of work to become broadly adopted and well-known.

Today, when we look back, it seems that we had no idea of the amount of time we would dedicate to the project, of the fantastic feedback we would get from the community, and of the adoption that symfony would get. Today, symfony has become one of the best open-source web application frameworks out there. Today, we want to celebrate with you and tell everybody about this beautiful piece of software, this wonderful community, and this extraordinary personal experience that symfony is.

Hurrah for the symfony website

Where to look first? Let’s talk at the symfony website. It already gathers more than 100,000 unique visitors each month, and they come from all over the world. These visitors have already published more than 37 500 posts in the forum, where we have 3,800 registered users (not to mention the 1,000 people registered to the users mailing-list). All that makes Google Trends tell that symfony is among the most popular PHP frameworks out there.

We know have a couple of regular bloggers, including Javier Eguiluz who does a great job at tracking the changes in the symfony universe every week. Thank you for that, Javier.

After two years, the website hasn’t changed much (Fabien tried to turn it into a website-for-blind once, but the community was stronger). We recently switched to a stronger server, but that’s only the first of a series of more dramatic changes. With the upcoming of symfony-forge.com and symfony-project.org, and a new design, the organization of information will improve greatly.

Hooray for the symfony community

Developers from 80 countries of the world write symfony code every day. And the great thing is that they don’t just do it alone in their cubicle, they share it. What’s fantastic is that the open-source spirit of symfony continues to live among its users.

See for yourself: more than 200 plugins contributed in the wiki, 230 snippets, hundreds of wiki pages, translations of the documentation in Spanish, Italian, Polish, Chinese, Russian, French, Tcheck, Portuguese, German, Dutch and Japanese… And of course, you can find a new article every day in the blogosphere with dozens of weblogs posting regularly about symfony.

As while we speak of plugins, did you know that you can now create an application almost exclusively made of plugins? With complete functional blocks supported by sfGuard, sfSimpleCMS, sfMediaLibrary, sfLucene or sfSimpleBlog, it should not take you too long to build up a shiny web 2.0 application. We also address our warm thanks to the sfDoctrine developer team, who work really hard to provide a good alternative ORM layer to symfony.

And if you want to meet symfony people in real life, you can attend one of the Symfony Camps out there, or join the local symfony groups where developers gather for a beer from time to time .

Kudos for the symfony-powered applications

Those who work with symfony don’t just code for pleasure, they also publish websites that work.

When we learned about it, we couldn’t believe it ourselves: Even Yahoo! uses symfony for their applications. Not only Yahoo! Bookmarks, but also del.icio.us, the most emblematic web 2.0 service, was completely rewritten to work on the symfony platform. If these guys are willing to spend time and money to rewrite that much code on a framework, it sure shows that the framework is rock solid.

But that wouldn’t be fair to mention Yahoo! and not the hundreds (thousands?) of symfony-powered web applications. Thanks for trusting us, and we hope that choosing symfony was a bottom line for your businesses.

So symfony has created a new ecosystem, with job offers pouring in, and an increased salary for the developers who know the framework. Downloading and using symfony is free, but it may actually lead you to make a lot of money.

Yippee for the documentation

Open-source projects seldom propose as much (free) documentation as symfony. We published a whole book with Apress and released it in GFDL for your reading pleasure. We also wrote a 24 hours tutorial that made beginning with symfony a much easier task. A cookbook with some functionality-focused tutorials waits in a dark corner of the documentation page that you ask the right question.

The documentation is not only made of words. Today, explanations pass better through images than words, and that’s why symfony published screencasts right from the beginning. And if you really want to learn fast, Sensio gives workshops later this year, where you can learn in three days a month worth of knowledge.

Overall, English-speaking developers have access to more than a thousand pages of documentation online. Translations in other languages are ongoing, all by kind volunteers who spend hours doing this on their free time. Thanks you all for that.

Of course, the documentation work is not over. Fabien has many surprises for you symfony fans (a new advent calendar? New screencasts?) and you will soon realize that you still have a lot to discover about the true power of symfony. I also have some good tutorials in the works, that you might see published in the near future.

Thumbs up for the symfony code

The heart of symfony is the code that runs the applications. After 5500 changesets, its has been almost completely rewritten (twice) and is now better than ever. Some projections give to the codebase a value of almost ten million dollars . Symfony 1.0 was much more stable and faster than its predecessors, and since then we have worked a lot to improve it over and over. Code with confidence, for symfony is really a good piece of code.

This was made possible by the incredible work of Fabien, of course. Yet there are many more developers to thank, who took the time to dive into the code, understand its inner mechanisms, and contribute patches or enhancements.

In fact, Sensio, the company that sponsors symfony, has committed to maintain the 1.0 version up to 2009 so that you can start coding now without fear that future updates will break all your applications and leave you in the wild. Almost every month, a new release comes with its load of patches. Usually, this kind of regular service comes at a high price. With symfony, you get it for free.

Still a lot to come

We cannot talk about the symfony code without teasing you about the future of symfony. The 1.1 milestone is closer than ever, and the number of improvements that this version will contain is absolutely amazing. Object oriented CLI? A new form sub-framework? A new event system? A rewritten plugin system? That’s only a tiny share of the surprises that we have for you.

Celebrate, spread the word, have a drink, for today is a great day.

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#1 Dejan Spasic said about 2 hours later

Happy birthday!!!

#2 Javier Eguiluz said about 2 hours later

Happy birthday symfony!!!

And congratulations for your GREAT work!!!

#3 [MA]Pascal said about 2 hours later

Joyeux anniversaire :>

#4 Taku said about 2 hours later

Très bon anniversaire Symfony :)

Live long, and prosper !

#5 Garfield-fr said about 3 hours later

Ce deux années avec toi ont été merveilleuses ;)

J'adore écouter cette symfony :)

Merci pour pour ce merveilleux travail.

Bertrand

#6 Trip said about 8 hours later

Jeppa, happy Birthday from Bangkok. Nice that you gave this great framework to us. I am fairly new to symfony and there are hard times when I am stuck but most of the time my eyes bleed because it is so cool what you did. Not to forget the great plugins that are contributed and sometimes it takes just a couple of minutes to implement really cool features. Thanks to all of you, trip

#7 Serg Kalachev said about 11 hours later

Happy birthday, symfony !!!
Congratulations for all !!!

#8 Janaksinh said about 12 hours later

Happy B'Day..

Congratulation to all...!!

#9 Alexey Kupershtokh said about 12 hours later

Happy birthday from sunny Siberia :)

Symfony is the best!

#10 Thierry Schellenbach said about 13 hours later

Congrats!

#11 phuson said about 13 hours later

Happy birthday Symfony!

#12 Sylvio / Com-Océan said about 13 hours later

Sincères félicitations, quelle réussite !

In 2005, I'have look for a framework like Symfony for more than a year and discover it in april 2006. Since 18 months, I'm a big fan of SF and developp all websites with it, from tiny one to e-commerce one ;) Developping with SF is like playing Lego !

I hope I will release
before end of year my first plugin which is a little CMS with advanced routing management (in order to make work together a cms module for static webpage, cms extended modules or any kind of modules).

Happy birthday !!!

#13 Doug said about 14 hours later

Congrats to all!!

Keep it up ppl.

#14 Stefan said about 14 hours later

wow, happy birthday. I missed this yesterday as that was my last day at work with DOP. Happy birthday!!!!

#15 b166er said about 15 hours later

Happy Birthday!!!
thanks for the best framework ever!

#16 Mohammad said about 16 hours later

Happy birthday my little smart Symfony

#17 Vincent Texier said about 16 hours later

Joyeux Anniversaire !
Et bravo pour votre énoooorme travail...

#18 Lhutfhy Pribadi said about 16 hours later

Selamat ulang tahun symfony! Semoga panjang umur dan sukses selalu!

#19 hartym said about 16 hours later

hehe, nice to see the growth rate symfony took, i wonder if i'll be able someday to go back developping php apps without it :-)

happy birthday, and looking towards 1.1 :)

#20 Renaud said about 17 hours later

Joyeux anniversaire ! Et bravo !
http://digg.com/programming/Today_is_the_second_birthday_of_symfony

#21 Carlos Jacobs said about 18 hours later

Symfony es de lo mejor!

#22 Eric Bartels said about 18 hours later

Happy birthday to symfony! Good luck for the next year :)

#23 Franck SCHNEIDER said about 19 hours later

Joyeux Anniversaire et rdv au workshop de décembre !

#24 symfony.pl said about 20 hours later

Happy birthday from Poland and Congratulations :)

#25 fabio said about 20 hours later

Buon Compleanno Symfony (Happy Birthday from Italy)

#26 Serg Sokolenko said 1 day later

Thank you for symfony and happy birthday!

#27 ｊa said 1 day later

Congratulations！！
and Happy Birthday.

#28 Sergej Felde said 5 days later

Happy birthday!

#29 Mahmoud said 6 days later

Happy birthday from Iran.

#30 Sameer Arora said 11 days later

Great Framework, can enable the application to do wonders in no time.
Keep it up (Sameer From India)