The beginning of a new year is the best moment to review all that happened during the previous year. These are some of the highlights of the 2016 year for the Symfony Project.
Releases
We released two new major versions: 3.1.0 in May and 3.2.0 in November and 59 maintenance versions in five different branches (2.7, 2.8, 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2).
In addition, we published 57 "New in Symfony" articles explaining the new features introduced by Symfony 3.1 and 3.2.
Events and Conferences
We organized three local conferences: SymfonyLive Paris 2016 in April, SymfonyLive Cologne 2016 in April and SymfonyLive London 2016 in September. We also organized a global conference: SymfonyCon Berlin 2016
For those who couldn't attend the conferences, we celebrated a Virtual Code Hack Day in March and a Virtual Docs Hack Day in May.
In addition to the official events, the Symfony communities and user groups around the world organized hundreds of meetups and events, including conferences such as SymfonyCat 2016 in Barcelona (July), deSymfony 2016 in Madrid (September), Symfony Camp UA 2016 in Kiev (October) and SymfonyDay 2016 in Rome (October).
Check out the rest of community events and submit your own event.
Finally, save the dates for the conferences of 2017: Paris (March 30-31), Cologne (April 5-7), San Francisco (October 19-20) and Romania (Q4 2017).
Core Team
The Symfony Core Team, which is the group of developers who ultimately decide which features are added to Symfony, added a new member: Grégoire Pineau. The number of active members in the Core Team is now 15.
Symfony Components
In 2016 we celebrated that Symfony Components achieved 500 million downloads. The EventDispatcher component was the most downloaded component, but the Mbstring Polyfill component is quickly catching up and it became the component with the most daily downloads. Check out the Symfony downloads in pseudo real-time.
In 2016 we added four new components: APCu Polyfill, PHP 7.1 Polyfill, Cache and Workflow.
Documentation
One of the most appreciated features of Symfony was heavily improved during 2016. In April we added a real-time search engine thanks to our friends at Algolia. In July we unveiled the new Symfony Documentation, a massive effort to revamp the entire reorganization of the Symfony docs to make them easier to navigate.
Security
We disclosed three security advisories: CVE-2016-1902, CVE-2016-4423 and CVE-2016-2403.
If you have discovered a potential security problem, don't open an issue in the repository. Instead, send us the details privately via security [at] symfony.com
Stats
Andrey Astakhov, a fellow Symfony community member, has kindly shared with us some stats about the Symfony code and docs activity during 2016. Check out the full 2016 Symfony Stats.
Code Stats
Note: these numbers exclude the commits made exclusively for Symfony maintenance, such as the merging of pull requests and the periodic merging of older branches into newer ones.
Top Code contributors in 2016
- Nicolas Grekas (327 commits)
- Christian Flothmann (199 commits)
- Fabien Potencier (178 commits)
Honorable mentions: Kévin Dunglas (76 commits), Jules Pietri (69 commits) and Maxime Steinhausser (43 commits).
Top New Code contributors in 2016
These are the developers who made their first code commit in 2016.
- Robin Chalas (62 commits)
- Paráda József (17 commits)
- jwdeitch (12 commits)
Doc Stats
Note: these numbers exclude the commits made exclusively for Symfony maintenance, such as the merging of pull requests and the periodic merging of older branches into newer ones.
Top Docs contributors in 2016
- Javier Eguiluz (224 commits)
- Wouter de Jong (221 commits)
- Christian Flothmann (154 commits)
Honorable mentions: Ryan Weaver (132 commits), Henry Snoek (23 commits) and Victor Bocharsky (16 commits).
Top New Docs contributors in 2016
These are the developers who made their first docs commit in 2016.
- Talita Kocjan Zager (20 commits)
- Andrey Astakhov (12 commits)
- Denis Rendler (11 commits)
Content Stats
The 3 most popular blog posts published in 2016
We published 196 original blog posts, including 52 weekly summaries of the Symfony activity. These were the 3 most popular new blog posts:
- New in Symfony 3.2: Workflow component
- The Road to 500 Million Symfony Downloads
- New in Symfony 3.1: Cache component
The 3 most popular documentation pages in 2016
In summary
2016 was the best year in Symfony Project's history. 2017 will be even better and it will bring us new projects such as "Symfony Flex" (a new way to manage Symfony applications unveiled during the SymfonyCon Berlin 2016 conference), 1 billion downloads for Symfony Components (if the download rate keeps growing) and the return of the Symfony conferences to the United States (San Francisco, October 19-20).
Now it's your turn to add a comment in this article and tell us which was your favorite 2016 Symfony moment and what do you expect for 2017.
We made a huge conference in Barcelona about Symfony last July, and several conferences helped the growth of the community around the world. Take in account that Symfony is not only the Core and the Docs.
I know that there's the "small" part of the "other" conferences, but I think that these conferences are equally important for the "Symfony 2016 year in review" than other sections...
Marc, you are right! In addition to the meetups, there were some events organized by the community, such as SymfonyCat, SymfonyDay Italia, etc. In this post we decided to stick with the "official" events ... and we did the same for the blog posts (we only mentioned the official symfony.com blog posts), the code/docs commits (we only mentioned the official Symfony repo activity and not the third-party bundle activities), etc.
Just saying. And for all the @sensiolabs team, make sure that (ALL) communities are part of the most important things this year, don't forget that they are part of your engine ;)
The post has been updated to mention some big events from the community: SymfonyCat, deSymfony, Symfony Camp UA and SymfonyDay. Thanks for making us realize about this oversight.
My favorite moment was the release of the completely revamped profiler layout. It once again remembered me that the profiler and toolbar are a developer's best friend, and then even they became a better friends. Especially since they also started collecting translations per request :-)
Thank you for this retrospective 2016. You could have also announced a new platform Slack communication.
2016, first time contributed to Symfony repo and other 3rd party bundles it was such a great experience