When I started working on Symfony2 in late 2006 (no typo here, I first talked about my vision for Symfony2 during Symfony Camp 2007), I had some clear goals for this new major version of Symfony:

  • create a set of PHP components that are the best building blocks for developping any website (the first component was the event dispatcher that was included in symfony 1.1);

  • offer the best platform for creating end user products (versus websites); the full-stack framework being a by-product of these components (Silex was a demonstration of that possibility);

  • design a platform that decidedly revolves around HTTP.

This is the most exciting times for the Symfony community as my dream is slowly but steadily becoming a reality.

It all started during the Symfony Live conference in 2010; Nils Adermann and I talked about the possibility to use Symfony2 for phpBB4. In July 2011, the Midgard CMS team announced that they were transitioning to Symfony2. Then, the Zikula application framework also started to use some of the Symfony2 Components.

Today, I want to officially announce that Drupal will adopt some of the Symfony Components for their upcoming version 8. And I'm not talking about some minor components, they are embracing our vision and they will use the major components that will allow them to build a great low-level architecture for Drupal 8: HttpFoundation, HttpKernel, Routing, EventDispatcher, DependencyInjection, and ClassLoader.

By adopting HttpKernel, Drupal and Symfony projects will become more interoperable. It means that you will be able to easily integrate your custom Symfony applications with Drupal... and vice-versa.

This is a very good news for both communities: they benefit from our code and experience, and they will help us improve what we already have.

If you want to learn more about this announce, you can read Dries blog post on this topic.

Also, don't miss Dries keynote at DrupalCon Denver 2012 where he announced the collaboration with Symfony (and enjoy the great morphing between the Drupal and the Symfony logo):

You can also watch my session on Symfony2 during DrupalCon Denver 2012:

Or just have a look at the slides:

Take a minute to welcome the Drupal community and let's start working together to help them build one of the best CMS for PHP.

Of course, we must continue talking with other Open-Source PHP communities to see how we can collaborate; the ultimate goal being to make as much projects as possible interoperable. Let's try to eliminate the NIH syndrome in the PHP world!

Published in #Case studies #Community