« A week of symfony » blog posts

This week, Symfony2 PR5 was released and the definitive roadmap for Symfony2 was laid out. Meanwhile, the activity of the developers mailing list skyrocketed with tens of messages openly discussing every important feature of Symfony2. As a result of these discussions, the bundle management was completely refactored.

Symfony2 introduced this week some minor but profound refactorings: the routing component adopted URI template notation, bundles changed their names to be the class name of the bundle not the last part of the namespace and templates name format changed to bundle:section:template.renderer.format (both the renderer and the format are mandatory). Meanwhile, the Symfony2 donation drive to fund code security audits was an astonishing success.

Symfony2 repository received this week a massive amount of commits, mostly on Twig, Form, Security and Doctrine components. Twig bundle was heavily refactored to match the important changes introduced in Twig 1.0 RC1, which was also published this week. Security component added a brand-new ACL system and Form component added support for virtual field groups and a FieldFactory mechanism to automatically create fields by introspecting metadata of a class. Meanwhile, in the last weekly IRC meeting, Fabien unveiled some interesting information about Symfony2, including a new way to handle web assests and the expected roadmap until its final release.

This week marks the start of what could be the most important year of the symfony project history. For starters, in less than three months' time, Symfony2 will be published and two official symfony conferences will be held at Paris and San Francisco. Therefore, symfony project wishes a very happy new year to all its supporters and developers.

Form and Validation components were heavily updated this week, including the refactorization of code to a new Locale component and the implementation of new fields and constraints. In addition, Doctrine project published the first stable release of Doctrine 2.0.

Symfony2 committed this week two huge changesets related to the Security component: fixed user refreshing after unserialization and added authentication trust resolver. It also committed two small but important tweaks: the new hash syntax for Twig templates and the new format for XML attribute names.

This week, the definitive schedule for Symfony Live 2011 conference was published. Meanwhile, Symfony2 development activity focused on small tweaks and code refactoring.

This week, the Symfony2 Preview Release 4 version was released. Despite being far from finished, this is a full-featured version and therefore it's the best way to learn the new Symfony2 philosophy.

Symfony2 development activity exploded this week with thousands of changes, tweaks and additions across most of its components: twig bundle, forms and dependency injection improved their performance; the Output Escaper component was removed; and lots of methods were renamed to follow the new naming convention. Symfony2 is gaining momentum week by week and therefore, the release of PR4 version is around the corner and the first beta version could be published before the end of the year.

Symfony2 development activity got a big boost this week. Firstly, Bernhard Schussek announced that he will be again in charge of the form and validation components, which will be finished by the end of the year. Secondly, Fabien initiated two interesting discussions in the developers mailing list: removing the output escaper component and using templates for routing patterns. Lastly, the weekly IRC meeting generated some exciting discussions, ideas, best practices and updates about Symfony2 development status.