I like to say that an Open-Source project is nothing without a user community. You can have the best technical product ever, if nobody is using it, if nobody maintains it, if nobody spreads the word about it, it's useless. It's merely a proprietary project with an Open-Source license attached to it.
Symfony is first and foremost a community.
Today, the Symfony community is under attack.
Ukraine is in the top 10 countries in term of visitors on this website (about 100.000 unique users during the last year alone). And we can see the traffic drop since last week :(
We have more than 2.000 registered SymfonyConnect users in Ukraine.
The Symfony book is already available in Ukrainian for both Symfony 5.4 and 6.0. It was one of the very first translations available thanks to the hard work of wonderful Ukrainians developers. The PDF book in Ukrainian on leanpub is now free and it will stay free forever.
If you enjoy watching Symfony videos on SymfonyCasts, you can thank Ryan and Leanna from the US, but also Victor from Ukraine.
I went to the PHP FWdays conference in Kyiv a few years ago and that was one of my best experiences at a conference. I signed so many Blackfire books there! I had very nice conversations and I had a great time sightseeing Kyiv. It's not just me as Nicolas went also to Kyiv for SymfonyCamp.
I was back in Kyiv a couple years later to meet the Smile team there. SensioLabs, now part of the Smile group, has 300+ developers working in Ukraine.
You are probably using projects and libraries created by Ukrainians, like Codeception.
I can go on and on.
Symfony owes a lot to the Ukrainian community. Symfony owes everything to its community.
What can we do as a community?
Since February 24th, 2022, Ukraine has been under attack. This is sad, and we should do everything possible to help them as much as we can. Ukraine won't surrender. They need our help.
We are about to send an email to all Symfony community members who live in Ukraine that we are aware of to see if they need help and how we can support them. Embassies are currently saturated and we offer strong hands to dispatch the requests to different local associations for any urgent needs. We are committed to help and you can contact us directly at ukraine@symfony.com.
As developers, we can also help. Titouan, one of the Symfony core team members, has step up last night to develop a website for the Ukrainian embassy in France, as their official website is down due to the war. He is working with the embassy as we speak and the website will be online tomorrow. Cloudflare was kind enough to help us be sure that this website will stay online and secure.
But there are so many ways we can help. For European, I support Ukraine website, written in Symfony, connects people willing to help the Ukrainian people, in the EU and in Ukraine. It also gives links to donate and participate to events. The SymfonyCasts also has a page with international links and tips.
Together, we can make a big difference. Take care.