New community page, lots of plugins

If you are a regular visitor of the symfony community page, you probably noticed that it radically changed recently. Instead of a simple hub page leading to the forums, mailing-lists and wiki, the community page is now an aggregation of content from all these sources, as well as an overview of the latest posts mentioning symfony in the blogosphere.

If you want your weblog to be included in the list of sites visited by our aggregator, please add it to the list of symfony bloggers in the wiki. You will receive a visit once a day from our server, so it shouldn't change your weblog stats too much...

The new community page makes a heavy use of two new symfony plugins, sfWebBrowser and sfFeed2. The first is a lightweight HTTP client, RESTful and similar in syntax to the sfTestBrowser. The second is a refactoring of the original sfFeedPlugin, which you probably heard of when following the askeet tutorial. What's new in sfFeed2 is that not only does it publish RSS and Atom feeds based on an array of objects, it also reads feeds fetched from the Internet and allow their manipulation and aggregation.

These two plugins are just a sample of the fantastic plugin activity since the 1.0 release. Several new plugins are released every week, and the list of available plugins now shows more than fifty plugins, and counting. I mention only a few ones here, just as an appetizer:

• sfDoctrine: A full-featured model layer, providing integration of the phpDoctrine ORM. Comes with admin generator, schema.yml, i18n, fixtures loading, etc.

• sfPokaYokePlugin: A client-side validation in JavaScript, using the rules defined in your YAML validation files.

• sfPropelActAsNestedSetBehaviorPlugin: An implementation of nested sets for Propel, packaged as a behavior.

• sfUJSPlugin: A replacement for Prototype, aiming at unobtrusiveness and ease of use. Currently uses jQuery instead of Prototype.

Plugin authors are advised to publish a post in the users mailing-list whenever they release a new plugin or an important upgrade. As for the developers, they already know how to spot new plugins by following the trac timeline.

We strongly advise you to watch the plugins page and test the newly released plugins - developers love feedback, and who knows, a plugin may save your day. If you feel like contributing a piece of code that you find particularly useful, you now have plenty of examples on how to package it into a reusable plugin.

So write about symfony and contribute new plugins, the symfony community will thank you!