Symfony 2016 Year in Review

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.

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.