The end of the year is the best time to review all that we achieved as a community during the past twelve months. These are some of the highlights of the 2017 year for the Symfony Project.

Releases

We released three new feature versions: 3.3.0, 3.4.0 (the last 3.x version and a long term support release) and 4.0.0. In addition, 85 maintenance versions were released in 7 different branches (2.7, 2.8, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0).

We published 71 New in Symfony blog posts, 29 for Symfony 3.3 features and 32 for Symfony 3.4 features (which are also the new features of Symfony 4.0).

Events and Conferences

We organized five local conferences: SymfonyLive Paris 2017 in March, SymfonyLive Cologne 2017 in April, SymfonyLive London 2017 in September, SymfonyLive San Francisco 2017 in October and SymfonyLive Berlin 2017 in October. We also organized a global conference in Romania in November: SymfonyCon Cluj 2017.

In addition to the official events, the Symfony communities and user groups around the world organized hundreds of meetups and events, including conferences such as deSymfony 2017 in Castellón (Spain), SymfonyDay 2017 in Milan (Italy) and Symfony Camp UA 2017 in Kiev (Ukraine).

Check out the rest of Symfony community events and submit your own event.

Finally, save the dates for the Symfony 2018 conferences: Paris (March 29-30) and Cologne (May 2-4). Dates for the London, North America and Lisbon (Portugal) events will be announced soon.

Core Team

The Symfony Core Team, the group of developers that determine the direction and evolution of the Symfony project, added three new members: Robin Chalas, Maxime Steinhausser and Tobias Nyholm.

Symfony Components

On September 5th, the Symfony Components crossed a huge landmark, the 1 billionth download, and became the project with most downloads in PHP history.

At the time of writing this blog post, the pseudo-real time download stats show more than 1.2 billion downloads, with four components averaging more than 100,000 daily downloads and the three most downloaded components are: EventDispatcher, Console and Yaml.

In 2017 we added four new components: DotEnv, WebLink, Lock and Polyfill PHP 7.2. We also published our first non-PHP "component" called Webpack Encore which bridges Symfony applications with modern JavaScript based tools to manage and process web assets.

Symfony 4

The biggest news for Symfony in 2017 was the Symfony 4 release.

Symfony 4 is not just a new major Symfony version; it's an entirely reimagined development experience. Symfony 4 is twice as fast than Symfony 3.4 and it uses 70% less code when creating a new application. It also boosts your productivity with service autowiring and the automation provided by Symfony Flex.

Diversity

The real success of a project is best measured by its community: the people working on/with the project. The biggest challenge for Symfony as a community is how to increase its diversity. That's why on November we announced the diversity initiative, led by Lukas Kahwe Smith. You'll hear about diversity a lot in 2018 with multiple specific and actionable initiatives.

Other Relevant News

WebServer bundle was released in January to provide some utilities on top of PHP's internal web server.
The Symfony Demo 1.0.0 version was released in February and we updated it to Symfony 4 in December.
We run a Symfony Community Survey 2017 in March and the results were published in May.
A case study about the open source platform of the new French president built with Symfony was published in May.
We ended HHVM support for Symfony Components in May.
The symfony.com front-end was refactored to use modern web asset management tools and Webpack Encore.
In October we announced the first scholarship and volunteer programs for Symfony conferences.
A community initiative to help third-party bundles prepare for Symfony 4 was organized in November.
We introduced the Symfony Maker bundle in November as a modern scaffolding utility for Symfony 4 apps.
The winners of the Symfony 2017 Community Awards were announced in December.

Thank You

None of the above would have been possible without you: the people who use Symfony, contribute code or docs, organize or attend events, deliver talks and workshops, tweet or retweet about Symfony, publish blog posts, help others in GitHub, Slack or forums. Thank you for making the Symfony project so special.

That's precisely the idea of our last 2017 initiative: say thank you to the projects and libraries used in your projects. You just need to run one command: