symfony 1.0 released

As we say in French: "Champagne!".

At last, the long-awaited 1.0 stable version of symfony is just released. For all those who waited for the "stable" status to dive into symfony, the time has come.

Symfony is more mature than ever, faster than ever, and more configurable and extendable than ever. A lot of websites officially declare using symfony, and we know of dozens of other applications, either Intranet or Internet, running symfony without any problem. The symfony framework is definitely ready to power complex web 2.0 applications with a lot of users. It has a tremendous amount of documentation and tutorials, including the just-released Definitive Guide to Symfony, a 490p book published by Apress, written by Fabien and me, and free to read online. And you will also find a vibrant community, always ready to give you a hand when starting up a symfony application.

The 1.0 is not just another release. We call it an "enterprise" release, which means that we will keep on maintaining it for a long time (that is, for several years). When a new release of PHP comes with its wagon of BC break, we will update symfony 1.0 to make it compatible. When a bug is found and corrected in one of the components of symfony 1.0, we will update the stable release to make the symfony experience always better.

To install symfony 1.0, head to the book installation chapter or do a checkout from the SVN repository. By the way, if you use svn:externals to reference the symfony libraries in your project, you might want to switch to the 1.0 branch (http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.0), which is the feature-freeze, stable and maintained version of symfony, recommended for production. Newcomers should first give a look at the first project tutorial or at the Ajax screencast, which are good introductions to symfony.

Of course, the development of symfony doesn't stop there. We have tons of ideas for improvements and new features, and you can also add your own. Extending symfony 1.0 is already very easy thanks to plugins, which you can find and contribute in the symfony wiki.

Now, we need you, humble readers, to make some noise about symfony 1.0. If there is one moment to share your experience with symfony in social networks, forums or user groups, it is now. If there is a time to praise the symfony experience, the ease of development, the quality of code and documentation, and the fun, it is now. The more developers will come and use symfony, the better the community and the framework will get.

Finally, we would like to thanks you for all the encouragements we've received, all the tickets/patches/user documentation that you submitted, all the knowledge shared in the mailing list/forum/irc channel, and all the flowers you sent us. We are very happy to share this moment with you, and we hope that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.