When a major French cinema giant had an ambitious idea for a new national film award for teachers, they faced an impossible deadline. Their challenge: go from concept to launch in just a few weeks. Discover how Symfony made it possible to deliver a robust, large-scale platform on an unheard-of timeline.
🚀 From idea to launch in record time
In the summer of 2024, UGC — one of France’s largest cinema operators — approached Antéa Solutions, with an ambitious idea: to create a brand-new award in which teachers nationwide could vote for the most valuable film for educational purposes. The project had to be ready for the 2024–2025 school year and launched by December, meaning the team had only a few weeks to go from concept to production.
Founded in 1998, Altéis Groupe is a company with nearly 200 employees. Within the group, Antéa Solutions — its subsidiary with a strong team of Symfony experts — accepted the challenge. As a long-time Symfony partner since 2016, Antéa Solutions knew it could rely on the framework’s flexibility and robust ecosystem to build something reliable and scalable in record time. In just one month, the Teachers' Film Award platform, called “Prix Cinéma des Enseignants” in French, was live, welcoming its first users.
✨ A star performance: Symfony’s robust technical foundation
From the beginning, the project was driven by a clear goal: to provide teachers with a simple and engaging experience while giving UGC’s teams a powerful administration interface. The stack chosen for the project reflected the need for speed and stability: Symfony 7.1 with PHP 8.2, MySQL 8.4, and Turbo 2.23 to enable smooth, reload-free navigation. The team also used EasyAdmin to build a custom back office and Symfony UX Turbo to create intuitive and dynamic forms. They used AssetMapper to keep front-end assets organized and minimal.
The public-facing interface allowed teachers to browse a selection of films and cast their votes. Meanwhile, the back office gave UGC complete control over managing seasons, films, and vote tracking. One of the key UX features was a custom cinema-themed carousel, designed to immerse teachers in an inspiring environment.
🎥 Behind the scenes: Tackling challenges with Symfony
The main challenge was the extremely tight schedule. The platform had to be built from scratch and launched in just one month. From day one, the Antéa Solutions team approached this by working in close collaboration with UGC. Together, they quickly defined personas, mapped user journeys, and created wireframes to accelerate development.
Security was another key concern, and Symfony played a pivotal role in addressing it. From the very beginning, the platform was designed with security by default: teachers’ identities had to be verified while keeping the voting process simple and intuitive. Using Symfony’s Security component, CSRF protection, and validation mechanisms, the team ensured that only authenticated teachers could cast a vote. A rate-limiting system was also introduced to prevent abuse and multiple submissions. Using Symfony, they designed a system that balanced verification with ease of use, avoiding the common pitfalls of complex authentication flows. The platform was also optimized to handle significant traffic peaks, for example more than 20,000 unique visitors over 12 hours when it was promoted on ugc.fr homepage, which generated sudden increases of visitors.
🙌 Standing ovation: Successful launch, major impact
The platform went live on December 16, 2024, and immediately received strong engagement. A continuous integration and delivery process was set up to ensure rapid deployment, allowing the team to push new updates almost instantly. Thanks to this agility, the team could also react quickly to user feedback after launch. For example, by integrating a dedicated directory service, the team enabled teachers to easily find their official UAI (school ID). Instead of manually entering a complex code, teachers could simply select their academy and search for their school from an intuitive interface. This improvement significantly reduced friction and increased form completion rates by 40%.
Teachers appreciated how simple it was, and the feedback during the award ceremony was overwhelmingly positive. This project also proved that Antéa Solutions could deliver production-ready fixes and improvements within days, even under heavy load.
🫶 Giving back to the community
Symfony was at the heart of this success. With its fast development cycles, rich ecosystem of bundles, and excellent performance profile, Symfony was ideal for building a reliable, maintainable, and scalable platform. The Antéa Solutions team used a range of community tools for analytics, mailing, and monitoring (including Sentry), allowing them to focus on business features instead of infrastructure.
During the project, the team created and open-sourced their first Symfony bundle: the HagreedBundle, designed to easily manage user consent. They published the bundle on Packagist and GitHub as a Symfony Flex recipe, making it instantly usable by other developers. It was their way of giving back to the community that had supported them for years.
Looking ahead: The sequel with Symfony
The success of this first edition paves the way for the upcoming second edition and confirms to Antéa Solutions that Symfony is the right choice for turning ambitious ideas into national-scale, high-quality platforms thanks to its agility and reliability.
Thanks to Ronan SAUVAGE, Scrum Master, Altéis Groupe
