Learning about the Symfony Components

If you visited us at Symfony Day Cologne or keep a close ear on the conversation around Symfony, then you already know that momentum and awareness is rapidly growing behind the components that make up Symfony. Sure, Symfony is a framework, but more fundamentally, it's a group of 20+ decoupled components, each of which can be used inside any PHP project (yes, even that old legacy app you maintain that just won't go away).

This flexibility is what makes things like Silex possible - a microframework built using several Symfony2 components. Drupal has also decided to adopt at least two of the Symfony components for Drupal 8 and feedback from their community has already been wonderful. The beauty is that this is exactly why the components where built: to be the basic building blocks of any PHP application or framework. The fact that they're also bringing different communities together is a great bonus.

But now we need your help! As a community, we've put a lot of work into the Symfony2 framework documentation. It's not perfect, but there's a lot of great resources. Now it's time to focus on documentation for the individual components.

Fabien already kicked things off by bootstrapping a new "components" section of the documentation. But there's a lot more to do! If you'd like to learn more about the Symfony2 components and give back at the same time, here's what you can do:

• Check out the components tag on the symfony-docs GitHub repository for a current list of pending items

• Choose a particular component, study its files, and bootstrap its docs! Follow the example of the other sections and get us started!

• Read the existing component documentation, try things out, and let us know how we can make things better.

The goal, of course, is for a developer to be able to install, setup, and use each component in a meaningful way just by reading through some friendly docs. Sure, we've got a ways to go, but with your help, we can get there soon!

And if you're still reading (nice work!), remember that each time you can't find documentation or read an error message that's just not clear enough, there are hundreds others just like you. But when you add those docs or improve that error message, you stop the cycle and save countless hours. That's the beauty of a community like ours. Thanks.