This week, "A Week of Symfony" reaches an extraordinary milestone: issue #1,000. Nearly 20 years and 1,000 consecutive weeks reporting the weekly activity of the Symfony project. This is arguably the longest-running blog series in the tech industry. Thanks to all of you who follow us every week, some even since the very beginning.

A Week of Symfony published its 1,000 issue

The first "A Week of Symfony" issue was published on January 8, 2006, although the oldest issue available publicly is #18 from May 1, 2006. To put that in perspective, here's a list of common products and services that didn't exist when "A Week of Symfony" started: Amazon AWS (March 2006), Twitter/X (July 2006), Netflix streaming (2007), iPhone (2007), Spotify (2008), GitHub (2008), Google Chrome (2008), Android (2008), Instagram (2010).

To celebrate this milestone, we analyzed the contents of all "A Week of Symfony" issues and crunched some curious stats.

Publishing "A Week of Symfony"

We use a Symfony Console based tool to automate the initial data collection, but every issue is curated by hand. For example, when building the changelog we skip trivial pull requests, group related changes, and keep the focus on what matters most. For the "They Talked About Us" section, we start with our RSS feed reader to discover new posts about Symfony, then we extend the search across platforms such as dev.to and Medium.

We've never failed to publish an issue in the last 1,000 weeks, so the streak has survived holidays, vacations, and nearly two decades of Sundays. That includes publishing "A Week of Symfony" on:

  • Christmas (December 25): #521 (2016) and #834 (2022)
  • New Year's Day (January 1): #522 (2017) and #835 (2023)
  • Symfony's birthday (October 18): #146 (2009), #459 (2015) and #720 (2020)

Fun facts:

  • "A Week of Symfony" is always published on Sundays. That is why we have never published it on February 29. The last time February 29 fell on a Sunday was in 2004 (two years before the first "A Week of Symfony"). The next one will be in 2032. Will "A Week of Symfony" still be around then? We certainly hope so.
  • Some years even had 53 issues because they had 53 Sundays. That happened in 2012, 2017 and 2023. The next one will be 2028.

The top publication hours are: 10:xx (CET) (24.6% issues), 11:xx (20.5%), 22:xx (11.2%), 09:xx(9.9%), 12:xx (7.7%).

The Big Numbers

That weekly discipline has added up to something remarkable. Over 1,000 issues, "A Week of Symfony" has grown into:

  • 661,547 total words (29,453 unique words and 4,644,544 characters)
  • The equivalent of 8 average novels and longer than The Lord of the Rings (480,000 words)
  • 2,646 printed pages (250 words/page)
  • 73.5 hours if read aloud at podcast pace

The longest issue was #153 (December 6, 2009) with 3,265 words (back then, "A Week of Symfony" also included the changelog of third-party plugins/bundles, and some weeks were intense).

Winter issues (in the Northern Hemisphere) are the longest on average (715 words), followed by Spring (695), Autumn (681) and Summer (611). Even open source seems to follow seasonal rhythms.

A Week Of Symfony: Average Words Per Year

After years of stable numbers in average issue length, 2025 became the year with the longest "A Week of Symfony" issues since 2011. And 2026 is already surpassing those numbers.

Turning Points We Still Talk About

Across 1,000 issues, "A Week of Symfony" has reported and documented Symfony's history. Here are the defining moments, as they appeared:

  • #239 (July 31, 2011): Symfony 2 release, a complete rewrite of symfony1 that established the foundation of the Symfony we know today
  • #248 (October 2, 2011): Composer adoption, which revolutionized dependency management in PHP applications
  • #289 (July 15, 2012): first mention of the Symfony Certification program
  • #318 (February 3, 2013): first mention of SymfonyCon, the big worldwide annual Symfony event
  • #380 (April 13, 2014): a new governance model for the Symfony Core Team that shares decision-making power
  • #434 (April 26, 2015): Symfony Demo launch, the official reference application for Symfony
  • #509 (October 2, 2016): Symfony components achieve 500 million downloads
  • #518 (December 4, 2016): first announcement of Symfony Flex, which allows you to compose Symfony applications and automate package installation
  • #570 (December 3, 2017): Symfony 4 release, which introduced massive simplifications and flexibility that still power modern Symfony versions
  • #612 (September 23, 2018): SymfonyCasts introduction, the best place to learn about Symfony, PHP and more
  • #622 (December 2, 2018): Symfony Cloud is launched as the best platform to deploy your Symfony projects
  • #669 (October 27, 2019): Symfony, The Fast Track is launched as the official Symfony book
  • #688 (March 8, 2020): the first issue that included the changelog of Symfony CLI, the local development tool for Symfony developers
  • #727 (December 6, 2020): Symfony UX is launched as a set of PHP & JavaScript packages to solve everyday frontend problems
  • #967 (July 13, 2025): the introduction of Symfony AI, a set of components and bundles designed to bring AI capabilities directly into your PHP applications

While "A Week of Symfony" is all about reporting great and positive news about Symfony, it also reflects the life of our community. In #974 (August 31, 2025), we reported the passing of Ryan Weaver, a beloved member of the Symfony community who, among many contributions, created SymfonyCasts and taught thousands of developers how to use Symfony. Rest in peace, Ryan. We miss you.

Tech Archeology

Beyond Symfony's own milestones, "A Week of Symfony" captured the first appearances of technologies that later became standard in every PHP developer's toolkit:

  • Doctrine: issue #24 (June 18, 2006)
  • PHPUnit: issue #41 (October 14, 2007)
  • Twig: issue #158 (January 10, 2010)
  • Composer: issue #248 (October 2, 2011)
  • Docker: issue #416 (December 21, 2014)
  • Webpack: issue #426 (March 1, 2015)
  • PHPStan: issue #562 (October 8, 2017)
  • FrankenPHP: issue #824 (October 16, 2022)

Word Archaeology

When you have 661,547 words to analyze, patterns start to emerge:

  • symfony word appears 25,565 times
  • added (6,887), fixed (6,518), issues (2890), and changelog (2,719) are the next top words
  • Words that have appeared in one or more issues every single year: development, highlights, updated, release, method, user, component, output.

Fun fact: there are 240 occurrences of the exclamation sign ! and 320 occurrences of ?, so there's more curiosity than excitement.

The evolution of the top words unique to each era:

  • Early era (#1 – #346): plugin (1049), documentation (1036), plugins (985), admin (844), propel (793)
  • Middle era (#347 – #673): twig (427), deprecated (368), debug (352), yaml (259), exception (250)
  • Recent era (#674 – #999): video (814), symfonycasts (575), chapter (406), cli (386), httpclient (365)

From plugins to bundles and from documentation to videos, the vocabulary evolved alongside the framework.

Component Spotlight

The most mentioned components in "A Week of Symfony" history:

  • Form (2,725 mentions)
  • Security (1,726)
  • Cache (1,472)
  • Validator (1,390)
  • Dependency Injection (1,360)

Others that frequently appear: Console (1,266), Config (988), Translation (948), Messenger (915), HttpKernel (905), Routing (895), HttpFoundation (805), Serializer (759), Yaml (708), Process (494).

Symfony version mentions have remained relatively stable over time. Symfony 2.x is the most mentioned series, largely because it included nine minor releases instead of the usual five. Meanwhile, Symfony 7.x and 8.x are still too recent to catch up with the earlier versions:

A Week Of Symfony: Mentions Per Symfony Version

Issues and PRs

At its core, "A Week of Symfony" is a record of people building things together. We've tracked that work since day one, when we self-hosted code using a project called Trac because GitHub didn't even exist. In issue #158, we moved to Git and GitHub.

In this time, we've tracked (and linked to) 62,279 code changes (25,769 changesets in Trac and 36,510 PRs in GitHub). The most commented PRs in Symfony's history tell you a lot about what the community cares about most:

  • PR #33553 which added the String component (366 comments)
  • PR #24411 which added the Messenger component (338 comments)
  • PR #51741 which added the ObjectMapper component (279 comments)

And the most popular PRs:

  • Most ❤️ reactions: #26059 which made route matching 80 times faster thanks to regexp
  • Most 👍 reactions: #33579 which added .gitattributes to remove the tests/ directory from dist
  • Most 🚀 reactions: #51718 which introduced the JsonStreamer component
  • Most 🎉 reactions: #22733 which bumped PHP requirements to 7.1 for Symfony 4
  • Most 👀 reactions: #51649 a still-pending PR that adds a new FeatureFlag component

Behind every mention is a bug fixed, a feature added, a contributor spending time to improve something. Thank you all.

The Next 1,000 Weeks

We asked key members of the Symfony community: what would you love to see happen in your area over the next 1,000 weeks?

  • Hugo Alliaume on the future of Symfony UX: In the next 1,000 weeks, I would like to see non-opinionated packages for WYSIWYG editor and maybe DataTable, and integration with PandaCSS. For easier contributions, adding an AGENTS.md (or something equivalent) to help contributors to work on Symfony UX codebase. For developers working on Symfony apps, some MCP tools to help to generate Symfony UX code.

  • Christopher Hertel on the future of Symfony AI: I hope in a 1,000 weeks from now we will still continue to build, learn, and ship software with fun, quality, and style - fueled with Symfony & AI, of course. And if that AI thing is only a hype, we will look back, and at least we learned something. However, I hope that we still collaborate on ideas and support each other in a vivid, respectful, diverse, and inclusive Open Source community.

  • Wouter de Jong on the future of Symfony Docs: In 1,000 weeks from now, I can only wish for the Symfony documentation to receive as much contributions as today. I hope the docs will keep providing the basis for people to learn about the framework and its packages. But most of all, I hope the community will have a big content creation scene outside of the official docs. With people sharing their own knowledge and practical solutions on their blogs, streams, books and other media.

  • Nicolas Grekas on the future of Symfony Code: 1,000 weeks from now, I hope Symfony will still be this friendly community where people share their passion, embrace diversity and tolerance, and solve real-world challenges together. Not just building software, but building trust, mentorship, and long-lasting connections.

Finally, a personal note about the future of A Week of Symfony:

I hope "A Week of Symfony" keeps being published for many more years. With the rise of AI, I expect activity in the repos to increase, so the changelogs and feature listings will only get larger. But the thing I want most is for the community to keep publishing blog posts about Symfony. Reading those and linking to them is my favorite part of "A Week of Symfony".

1,000 Issues Later

What started in 2006 as a simple weekly summary has become the longest-running Symfony tradition.

But "A Week of Symfony" was never really about the newsletter itself. It was about what it reflects: a community that ships code every single week, that writes blog posts and records videos, that reviews pull requests and files issues, that shows up at conferences and helps strangers on forums. 1,000 issues exist because 1,000 weeks of real work happened behind them.

Thank you to everyone who has been part of that work, whether you contributed code, wrote a blog post, or simply read "A Week of Symfony" over your Sunday coffee.

See you next Sunday. And the 1,000 after that.

Symfony development highlights

This week, 82 pull requests were merged (54 in code and 28 in docs) and 56 issues were closed (31 in code and 25 in docs). Excluding merges, 44 authors made 6,875 additions and 659 deletions. See details for code and docs.

6.4 changelog:

  • d8f544e: [Form] fix missing resource tracking for type extensions in FormPass
  • 297b8ee: [Messenger, AmazonSqs] add test for default queue_name when not set in DSN path or options
  • c6d4927: [Console] fix various completion edge cases
  • 7911785: [FrameworkBundle] make ConfigDebugCommand use its container to resolve env vars
  • 56a57f1: [HttpKernel] fix default locale ignored when Accept-Language has no enabled-locale match
  • 6152a46: [Validator] fix type error for non-array items when Unique::fields is set
  • 78877be: [Form] fix merging POST params and files when collection entries have mismatched indices
  • 26383b6: [TwigBridge] fix Bootstrap 4 form errors rendered inside
  • ba840b9: [Mailer] clarify the purpose of SentMessage's "message id" concept
  • 839082f: [DependencyInjection] fix PriorityTaggedServiceTrait not discovering #[AsTaggedItem] on decorated services
  • ccfcb2a: [Messenger] fix re-sending failed messages to a different failure transport
  • d8be35d: [DependencyInjection] fix #[AsTaggedItem] discovery through multi-level decoration chains
  • 08bc25c: [Messenger, Amqp] don't use retry routing key when sending to failure transport
  • b97074c: [Filesystem] remove ending slash in existing files when using makePathRelative
  • e336f99: [Config, Routing] fix exclude option being ignored for non-glob and PSR-4 resources
  • a754a81: [Serializer, Validator] fix propertyPath in ConstraintViolationListNormalizer with MetadataAwareNameConverter
  • 731b292: [RateLimiter] fix reservations outside the second fixed window
  • 27b9922: [RateLimiter] fix retryAfter when consuming exactly all remaining tokens in SlidingWindow
  • edc0941: [RateLimiter] fix retryAfter when consuming exactly all remaining tokens in FixedWindow and TokenBucket

7.4 changelog:

  • 19ef65c: [Mailer] fix handling postal transport apikey
  • d80ea17: [Mailer, Mailchimp] fix webhook rejection by switching to form-encoded request parsing
  • bc7f922: [Validator] fix required options not validated when constructor calls parent with null
  • 8671138: [Routing] assign attribute aliases to localized route if applicable
  • 9cd9728: [ObjectMapper] fix nested mapping with class-level transform
  • fac1a53: [Validator] correctly handle null allowedVariables in ExpressionSyntaxValidator
  • 338c31c: [Validator] add a guard when Parser::IGNORE_UNKNOWN_VARIABLES is not defined
  • 844b599: [Config] fix ArrayShapeGenerator required keys with deep merging

8.1 changelog:

  • ac8cf08: [PropertyInfo] add support for property hook settable types
  • 198742f: [Console] add customization to SymfonyStyle progressBar
  • 47253bc: [Form] add support for submitting forms with unchecked checkboxes in request handlers
  • 3d1d71d: [Console] allow setting a boolean default value on InputOption::VALUE_NEGATABLE options
  • c51a839: [Console] deprecate combining incompatible mode flags in InputArgument and InputOption
  • 48170a4: [Console, WebProfilerBundle] trace argument value resolvers
  • cfc134a: [Translation] add automatic retry for 429 Too Many Requests responses in Crowdin
  • ce15944: [Messenger] route decode failures through failure handling
  • cf40c5c: [Yaml] improve dump of simple hash maps in sequences
  • 1ecac67: [Translation] add support for XLIFF PGS (Plural, Gender, and Select Module)
  • dfee56d: [HttpClient] add GuzzleHttpHandler that allows using Symfony HttpClient as a Guzzle handler
  • ee223f6: [Translation] extract locale fallback computation into a dedicated class
  • 66b190c: [Workflow] add generics marker to Workflow event classes

Newest issues and pull requests

Symfony Jobs

These are some of the most recent Symfony job offers:

  • Backend Symfony Developer at DigtAg
    Full-time - €42,000 – €55,000 / year
    Full remote
    View details
  • Lead Symfony Developer at Gravitiq
    Full-time - $3,000 – $5,000 / month
    Full remote
    View details
  • Symfony Developer at Collectmaxx
    Full-time - €4,000 – €6,500 / month
    Remote + part-time onsite (Rotterdam, Netherlands)
    View details
  • Symfony Developer at ongoing.ch
    Full-time - €80,000 – €120,000 / year
    Remote + part-time onsite (Zug, Switzerland)
    View details
  • Software Architect for a Symfony project at Califrais
    Full-time - €60,000 – €75,000 / year
    Remote + part-time onsite (Paris, France)
    View details

You can publish a Symfony job offer for free on symfony.com.

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