Symfony 1.1 Beta 2 released - What's new?

New Command Line Utility

• Completely rewritten from scratch (bye, pake!)
• Now based on an Object-Oriented subframework
• Allows for unordered named options
• Tasks are extensible
• Built-in help (php symfony help [taskname])
• Reliable, easy to use and intuitive

New form subframework

• Forms are now classes
• Form Widgets represent the view layer. The subframework provides more widgets than symfony 1.0 had form helpers.
• Native and easy handling of validation, fillin, request binding
• Native CSRF protection
• Native file upload validation
• Support for nested validations and widgets
• The Most Beautiful Form Framework You've Ever Seen In PHP - and you can even use it outside of symfony!
• Optional (your old forms still work!)

New plugin manager

• Completely rewritten from scratch
• Supports dependencies between plugins
• New options for more control over what you install (--install_deps, --release, --stability)
• Support for the REST API of a PEAR channel

Improved ORM integration

• Propel has been updated, and is now a plugin, bundled by default with symfony 1.1
• Behaviors can now be declared directly in the schema
• A schema can be overridden by another one
• New configure:database task to update both the propel.ini and databases.yml dsn from the command line
• More hooks in the code - that means more opportunities for extensions and behaviors
• Better i18n support ($article->getTitle('fr'))
• Improved dump/load, dealing with FK seamlessly
• YAML schema generated from a database is now more readable
• Support for the new Form subframework

Improved Routing

• The routing now has a cache layer: That's a massive boost for pages with a lot of URLs to generate
• Token separator in routes is no more limited to '/'. You can now use any characters, for instance to allow routes like /article/:title.:format
• PJS and multiformat are on the way
• The routing class is not a singleton anymore - that means that an application can have access to another application's routing objects

Improved internationalization

• I18n now uses the same caching techniques as the view, for faster-than-ever template generation
• A new task can find untranslated text strings in templates and add them to the dictionaries (symfony i18n:extract)
• Another new task can find text strings without __() in templates and report them (symfony i18n:find)
• XLIFF and gettext dictionaries can now be in multiple directories
• The I18n class is not a singleton anymore

Improved caching

• New caching factories, allowing to use Memcached or APC as caching storage
• Ability to remove the cache from another application
• The view cache manager now accepts wildcards in the remove() calls, whatever the caching factory you use
• Partials and components in cache can now add JavaScripts and stylesheets in the main response
• New general caching factory, for your non view-related caching needs
• The function cache can now use any caching factory (not only sfFileCache)

Improved configuration

• The Spyc parser was dumped, in favor of a brand new, home-made, more robust YAML parser
• Incorrect YAML files now throw a helpful error message
• Symfony can auto-check that it can run (check_configuration.php checks PHP version, extensions, etc.)
• The project and application configurations are now classes, offering convenient methods to customize the project directory structure and loaders
• An application can access another application's configuration

Improved Tests

• A performance tool allows to measure the speed difference between each version of symfony - objectively
• CSS3 selectors are now supported in the sfDomCSSSelector (:contains(), :first, etc.)

A gazillion little improvements that will make your life easier

• Actions can now end by renderPartial() or renderComponent()
• sfWebRequest now has an isMethod() method (if($request->isMethod('post')))
• Support for many-to-many relationships in fixtures
• Ability to execute an action on a selection of entries in the admin generator
• More information in the Web Debug Toolbar (PHP extensions, sfUser attributes, etc.)
• Improved error messages in Phing