Wednesday March 14th in Sheffield, Wes Thompson (@uresu) and Richard Miller (@mr_r_miller) hosted the first of (at least) three Symfony2 bootcamp sessions. The sessions aim to help experienced PHP developers get to grips with the Symfony2 framework from first principles. The first session dealt with setting up the standard distribution, installing the vendors, introducing the concepts of the Response object and finally went on to introduce some basic Twig concepts. There was also beer :)

The concept of the bootcamp was introduced by Wes, he talked about the ethos behind Symfony2 and the business benefits of the technology and the fantastic community that supports it. The technical training was then delivered by Richard with assistance from Rowan Merewood (@rowan_m). The session was a huge success, the atmosphere was great and the Sheffield PHP User Group (@shefphp) enjoyed record attendance of over 30 people! It was great to see people joining in from the PHPNW user group from Manchester, as well as developers from Ibuildings, Plusnet, and Orange.

Over the coming sessions they aim to build a real world Symfony2 application that makes use of the following technologies.

  • MongoDB
  • Doctrine2
  • Elastic Search
  • Imagine
  • Twig
  • Assetic

Feedback was very positive and gratefully received:

  • Gordon Peter Brown @gpbrown83: Enjoyed the #Symfony2 bootcamp session. Looking forward to next month!

  • Jenny Wong @miss_jwo: Really liking the simplicity of #Symfony2. Thanks to @ShefPHP guys for putting on the workshop

  • Ben Selby @benmatselby: Excellent night learning about Symfony thanks to @ShefPHP @mr_r_miller @uresu and @rowan_m

The course continues over the next few months and absolutely anyone is welcome, it’s lots of fun and they are a really friendly crowd, so even if you missed the first session you will be made very welcome. All you need to join in is a laptop with PHP >= 5.3.2 and an HTTP server installed and running, the signup page for the next session is already online at: http://sheffieldphp1204.eventbrite.co.uk/

Published in #Community