Now that Symfony2 is just around the corner, we need to better organize community support for both symfony1 and Symfony2. As more people start using Symfony2, the user mailing-list is becoming more and more difficult to follow. Some months ago, we decided to prefix all messages about Symfony2 with [Symfony2], but that does not cut it anymore. People get frustrated and it's not always easy to understand which version of the framework a message is referring to.

After an opinionated discussion on the mailing-list, I've decided to create two new mailing-lists that are replacing the current users mailing-list: one for symfony1 and another one for Symfony2. The current mailing-list has been switched to the archive mode; all messages will remain browseable and searchable but new messages will be rejected. So, current subscribers need to subscribe to at least one of the new mailing-lists.

Creating two new mailing-lists is the best compromise to make it clear that both symfony 1.4 and Symfony 2.0 are stable and supported versions of the Symfony framework. Even after the release of Symfony2, it will still make sense to start new projects on symfony1 for a lot of developers and companies: symfony 1.4 is very stable, it supports PHP 5.2, it has many available plugins, it has a great documentation, many developers know this version, it is supported until the end of 2012, and more. In fact, at Sensio, we still have many symfony 1.0 based applications that we won't upgrade anytime soon. And that's fine. The end of maintenance of symfony 1.4 does not mean the end of its life time.

Published in #Community