Today, I'm happy to announce the immediate availability of Symfony2 PR3. This is the first announcement of a Symfony2 Preview Release on this blog because I think we are now very close to the first alpha version of Symfony2 and so we need help to finish it.

What's new?

Since Symfony2 PR2, we have worked very hard to polish the current set of features; Symfony2 PR3 is the result of many hours spent to refactor the code and tweak it to make it more flexible, more coherent, more extensible, and more useable.

I won't list all the changes here, but let's talk about just one major change: the Symfony2 profiler. The profiler collects useful information about each request made to your application and store them for later analysis. Use the profiler in the development environment to help you debug your code and enhance performance; use it in the production environment to explore problems after the fact. You rarely have to deal with the profiler directly as Symfony2 provides visualizer tools like the Web Debug Toolbar and the brand new and shiny Web Profiler:

The Symfony2 Web Profiler

For more information, read the quick introduction about the Symfony2 developer tools or read the in-depth profiler documentation.

Besides adding new features, we have also worked on documentation. The new dedicated documentation website has been redesigned with many cool features like an index, a search engine, and a glossary. The Symfony2 API is now also available on its own dedicated website.

We have also added tons of new chapters to the official documentation; for instance, you can now learn everything you want to know about the Symfony2 internals.

Of course, documentation needs more love as it still lacks many important chapters.

How to test it?

Want to give Symfony2 a try? Download the sandbox and read the Quick Tour tutorial to get up to speed quickly.

How can you help?

Since we have started to work on Symfony2, more than 50 people have contributed to the code in one way on another (stats computed by http://github.com/visionmedia/git-extras):

  • 646 Fabien Potencier
  • 40 Jonathan H. Wage
  • 39 Kris Wallsmith
  • 28 Pascal Borreli
  • 18 Bernhard Schussek
  • 18 Jordi Boggiano
  • 16 Jeremy Mikola
  • 16 Brandon Turner
  • 16 ornicar
  • 12 Francois Zaninotto
  • 8 Dennis Benkert
  • 5 Bongiraud Dominique
  • 5 geoffrey
  • 4 Bulat Shakirzyanov
  • 4 Greg Thornton
  • 4 fivestar
  • 4 Noël GUILBERT
  • 3 Fabian Lange
  • 2 wodkaist
  • 2 Daniel Cestari
  • 2 Fabien Pennequin
  • 2 Justin Hileman
  • 2 Matthieu Bontemps
  • 2 Nils Adermann
  • 2 Sebastian Bergmann
  • 2 Thibault Duplessis
  • 2 Antoine Hérault
  • 1 Nicolas Fabre
  • 1 IamPersistent
  • 1 Gordon Franke
  • 1 Pierre Minnieur
  • 1 Romain Dorgueil
  • 1 sensio
  • 1 Sergiy Sokolenko
  • 1 Sébastien HOUZE
  • 1 tirnanog06
  • 1 avalanche123
  • 1 catchamonkey
  • 1 ever.zet
  • 1 Damon Jones
  • 1 Christian Stocker
  • 1 henrikbjorn
  • 1 Katsuhiro OGAWA
  • 1 Marc Weistroff
  • 1 Bulat (Hacker) Shakirzyanov
  • 1 Nathanael d. Noblet
  • 1 Benjamin Eberlei

It has never been easier to contribute to Symfony2, thanks to Git and Github awesomeness. Don't know where to start? Read the contributing documentation.

Contributing is also about people testing Symfony2 and providing early feedback on the various design decisions we took for this new major version of Symfony2. Don't miss the opportunity to influence the way Symfony2 is designed.

What still needs to be done?

Before entering the Symfony2 beta/RC release cycle, we have quite a few things that need to be done:

  • Security (authentication, authorization): I have already started to work on this feature and I will probably release a first version of what I have sometime in October;

  • I18N: We already have basic support for internationalization through the Zend Framework 2 but we probably need more (we are waiting for ZF2 to refactor it before going further);

  • Forms/Validation: Bernhard has done a tremendous amount of work on the new Form/Validation framework but it still not finished yet. Unfortunately, Bernhard does not have much time to dedicate to Symfony2 nowadays, so some developers need to take over it.

  • Installation: We need to work on the replacement of the symfony plugin:install set of commands. I have some ideas about that but I don't have time to work on it. The first step would probably be to try to use Pyrus, instead of reinventing the wheel.

If you want to help, join the developer mailing-list, tell me how you can help and let's discuss it. In the coming days, I will start adding tickets on things that need to be done. That way, everybody will be able to see the list of remaining tasks, and pick some to work on.

Symfony2 in the wild

Even if Symfony2 is still far from finished yet, a lot of people already use it for live websites. I know, they are crazy, but I want to thank them for being early adopters as they give us invaluable feedback about how Symfony2 behaves in real-life situations.

Don't use Symfony2 for your next project blindly. Keep in mind that Symfony2 is still a moving target and things break from time to time. Developers using Symfony2 in production know what they are doing.

Published in #Community #Releases