If you don't participate to the weekly IRC meetings and if you have not attended the Symfony Live Conference last week in Paris, you might have missed an important announcement. The Symfony core team has decided to delay the release of the Symfony2 final version. It has been a tough decision to make of course but we think that there is no point in rushing out Symfony2. We also think that this is indeed a good news for the project. Why? Because during the last few months, more and more great developers have joined the Symfony2 team. They give us great feedback on a day to day basis and as a result, the activity on the Git repository has been quite intense during the last few weeks. To back my words, let's just say that we have merged more than 300 pull requests in the last month alone and that more than 150 different developers have contributed in one way or another to Symfony2. This is fantastic, but it also means that we need a bit more time to stabilize all the changes we have made recently.

The core architecture is now stable, except for a few changes in the naming conventions that will be done in the coming days. It is really important that the core team is confident that the core architecture of Symfony2 is flexible enough as we will keep backward compatibility on it for the next few years.

We know that many of you are impatient and want to play with the framework. The good news is that it has never been easier to do so. The ninth preview release is now available for download. As we slow down the number of changes in the core framework, it is easier for us to release more frequently. It's also better as the documentation evolves quickly and it only documents the master version of the framework.

Upgrading from one preview release to the next one is now easier, thanks to the new UPDATE document (Japanese version).

So, why not at least release the first beta? Because we are waiting for the last big modification that will possibly be merged: the form framework refactoring. The first beta version will be released after we take the decision (probably at the end of this week) to merge this pull request or not. Entering beta means that all the main features of the framework will be available. That does not mean that we won't break backward compatibility here and there, but all these changes will be documented to ease migration.

Last but not the least, we have started to tag the public and stable API with @api. As I wrote in my last post on my blog: "All classes, methods, and properties tagged with @api are public in the sense that we guarantee their stability over time: their name, signature, and behavior won't change for any minor version of the library."

Published in #Releases