Symfony Community Bundles Survey

July 28, 2014 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

Symfony is all about bundles. As a matter of fact, there are nearly 2,500 public bundles available thanks to the extensive work of the Symfony community, including the ever popular, FOSUserBundle, KnpMenuBundle, HWIOauthBundle and MopaBootstrapBundle. But there are still many fabulous bundles which are not well known to the community.

As part of our DX initiative, we'd like to push community bundles to their limits. That's why we'd love to know which are the most useful bundles for your day-to-day work. It's not an issue of popularity, development activity or "purity" of code. We are focusing only on bundle usefulness.

Please, fill in this survey to share which community bundles you find most useful for your projects and, as always, thanks for your input.

Published in #Community

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Comments

Guillaume Fremont said on Jul 28, 2014 at 09:55

I basically can't stop a new project if FosUser and Mopa are not installed. In most of them we need to make a backoffice for the client, so Sonata is the key. For any project including PDF generation, KnpSnappy works like a charm Liuggio's Excel Bundle for custom Excel creation

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Jul 28, 2014 at 10:03

Thanks Guillaume! You've definitely mentioned some of the greatest Symfony bundles. And don't forget to share this survey with your workmates and other Symfony developers that you may know. Thank you!

Martin Aarhof said on Jul 28, 2014 at 12:57

Just parsed my composer files for my symfony projects, the list became

FOSUserBundle
MopaBootstrap
StofDoctrineExtensions
KnpMenu
SonataAdminBundle
KnpPaginator
FOSJsRouter
fontawesome

But there are so many good bundles out there, last week I found JMSTranslationBundle, what a awesome bundle, translation have never been better, though it seems like its kind of dead, so I had to fork it to work with newest version of composer. It looks like its created when symfony 2.1 just came out, but it works perfect with 2.5 also.

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Jul 28, 2014 at 13:44

@Martin awesome list of Symfony bundles! Please, don't forget to fill in the survey that you'll find in this post.

Piotr Gołębiewski said on Jul 28, 2014 at 14:11

Most of my projects use following:

AdmingeneratorGeneratorBundle
FOSUserBundle
AvocodeFormExtensionsBundle
JmsSecurityExtraBundle
JmsSerializerBundle
JmsDiExtraBundle
KnpMenuBundle
StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle
LiipImagineBundle
VichUploaderBundle

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Jul 28, 2014 at 14:23

@Piotr you are a classic Symfony developer :) I wasn't aware of AvocodeFormExtensionsBundle. Thanks for sharing it!

And please don't forget to fill in the survey.

Dirk Luijk said on Jul 28, 2014 at 16:18

Nice! My list - yes, I submitted the survey ;)

SonataAdminBundle
SonataBlockBundle
KnpMenuBundle
BraincraftedBootstrapBundle
LiipImagineBundle
FOSJsRoutingBundle
StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle

Albert Ganiev said on Jul 28, 2014 at 16:20

My 2 cents, -FOSUserBundle -FOSElasticaBundle -FOSCommentBundle -StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle -KnpMenuBundle -SonataAdminBundle stack -LiipImagineBundle -FMElfinderBundle -WhiteOctoberPagerfantaBundle -IvoryCKEditorBundle -StfalconTinyMCEBundle

P.S. survey filled and submitted :)

Patryk Kala said on Jul 29, 2014 at 10:21

"AdmingeneratorGeneratorBundle" - rly?! The worst bundle I ever seen.

Alejandro Steinmetz said on Jul 29, 2014 at 12:46

#10

My list :

AlesteGeneratorBundle FOSUserBundle FOSJsRoutingBundle LexikFormFilterBundle WhiteOctoberTCPDFBundle LiuggioExcelBundle StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle

I submitted the survey!

Jesús Damián García Pérez said on Jul 29, 2014 at 12:55

#11

I think that the thing more powerful of Symfony, in addition to muches something elses, are its bundles. Is awesome to need something and search, and see that someone made something right now.

Guillermo Quinteros said on Jul 29, 2014 at 13:22

#12

In my projects can not miss :

FOSUser
knpSnappy
liipImagine

Sebastiaan Stok Certified said on Jul 30, 2014 at 11:34

#13

BraincraftedBootstrapBundle
NelmioSecurityBundle
WhiteOctoberPagerfantaBundle
KnpMenuBundle
RollerworksMultiUserBundle
FOSRestBundle
SyliusResourceBundle (as 'better' alternative to using an Admin generator)

Ghost said on Jul 30, 2014 at 11:43

#14

Not a bundle, but the Doctrine project definitely needs some love. I find the (lack of) activity there a bit troubling. I'm well aware it's an open source project and people work on it in their spare time. Just pointing it out.

Ghost said on Jul 30, 2014 at 11:47

#15

More to the point:

KnpMenuBundle KnpPaginatorBundle SncRedisBundle LiipImagineBundle StofDoctrineExtensionsBundle DoctrineMigrationsBundle MopaBootstrapBundle

Lynn van der Berg said on Jul 30, 2014 at 18:09

#16

I'm usually not a fan of 3rd party bundles because they usually do more than I want. I must also mention that knpbundles enforces you to disregards your own standards for folder structures below your namespace. If I want to start autoloading in /src/, it's not allowed by definition of knp where as this suffices to all symfony and PSR standards.

I also dislike using bundles that wrap around stock features. JMS DI allowing property injection etc. Being as stock as possible, also allows you to adapt faster to new versions. Layer on layer on layer on layer is not something I like.

Jannik Zschiesche Certified said on Jul 31, 2014 at 07:38

#17

In general I agree with Lynn van der Berg. A lot of times it is just faster to build a custom solution than waste hours finding the right configuration for a third party bundle (especially if the documentation is mainly non-existant). Also I like the custom solution a lot more. I want a customized and specialized (in regard of UX) admin area and not just a prettier phpMyAdmin (I don't want to demote OS bundles, I just want to share why I don't use them) which some third party bundles automatically generate.

On the other hand it can save a lot of effort, if the bundle is developed cleanly and the documentation is good. And - the main point - the focus of the bundle should be clear and small. Also the amount of "magic" involved shouldn't be too high - I want to keep the feeling that I am still in control (exception: RAD bundles, where you expect a lot of magic - at least to a certain degree).

Two examples:

FOSJsRoutingBundle
IvoryOrderedFormBundle

Both perform their task very well and the intended use case is very narrow. This makes working with them seamless and easy. But I mainly keep the number of third party bundles down.

Richard van Laak Certified said on Aug 4, 2014 at 12:21

#18

Weird nobody is mentioning the RaulFraileLadybugBundle, as it seems to one of the best helping aids for any developer in my opinion ;-)

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Aug 4, 2014 at 14:24

#19

@Richard, maybe you are the first that mention that bundle publicly in this post, but believe me that tens of developers have mentioned that bundle in the survey.

And I completely agree with you: it's a superb bundle. I personally use it in all my projects :)