Three months ago, I announced that Drupal was adopting the Symfony Components for their next version. Since then, everybody has been excited about the news, and we start to see some nice cross-pollination between the two communities (code contributions, talks at conferences, ...).
At that time, I also said that having Drupal on board was great, but not the ultimate goal for Symfony; we had to continue talking with other Open-Source PHP communities to see how we can collaborate.
Today, eZ announced that eZ Publish will use the Symfony full-stack framework for their next version, eZ Publish 5, including Twig as a template engine.
Even if they chose Symfony, they will be able to keep full backwards compatibility with eZ Publish 4. Have a look at how they did that: clever, simple, and powerful.
The other interesting part of the announcement is the reasons why they chose to adopt Symfony instead of creating their very own framework (and remember that they are the creators of the eZ Components -- now renamed to Zeta Components):
"eZ decided to focus on its core-skill which is best-of-breed content and customer experience management. It was thus decided to move away from the home-brew controlling, templating, and commodity libraries layers. After benchmarking the available open-source PHP frameworks, the indisputable winner was the Symfony framework & community."
Curious about the code? Have a look at the still very new eZ Publish 5 code.
This is great news. As I said on Twitter earlier: "ezPublish moving to Symfony2 is another proof of the strength Symfony2 can bring to existing Open Source projects. Awesome!"
As I've been saying since 2007... Symfony has got legs :)
@Derek : And Symfony now got wings.
As eZ developers, we're very excited to work with Symfony ! It's a very nice framework with an awesome community :-).
Looking forward to contribute to it !
What's next ? Wordpress ?
Slightly disappointed that ezpublish seems to ship without many of the Symfony2 components (quite a few of the symfony-standard deps are not shipped in the composer.json file) as it would have been great to be able to build onto the CMS if it were shipped as a bundle.
Nonetheless this is quite exciting and I am looking forward to using and possibly contributing back, I hope they have allowed for additional features and sections to be added to the admin area (similar to custom extensions) .
@Neil: don't worry about that .. they will ship with the bundles they want to support and that make sense for their core user base. since its full stack they are using and since you have composer, you can easily add what you also want to use.
After being out of touch with the latest Symfony developments for a while now I'm flabbergasted by this amazing news! Almost anticipating this move I was working with symfony 1 together with ez Publish 4 before and so wished for an easier integration. I'm sure this decision will do nicely both for the framework and its stand withing the PHP world as well as ez Systems and their focus on its main competence. Congrats, well done!
@Neil : This is the very beginning and we will consider to embed the bundles you mention one by one :-). It's just that we didn't have time to inspect them for our needs and we wanted to focus on the core components/bundles.
So stay tuned !
Thanks all for the kind words, and thanks Fabien for breaking the news in perfect sync :)
From a communities perspective, I am delighted that we (eZ) made this decision : more people to meet and exchange with, more fun, and definitely a more solid product in the end. We are also keen on sharing our first contributions to Symfony.
See you all soon !
Spiffy! Welcome to the Symfony extended-family, ez Publish. :-)
Absolutely awesome! :) Welcome to the community!
so Symfony gets one step closer to world domination :-) awesome news!
So, who's next in the pipeline? ;-)
@Pierre: I have been kind of hoping for Yii. I have poked the core devs a few times. It would be awesome to get someone to work on a RAD layer for Symfony2 adding tons of conventions on top for those that prefer this development style.
Other than that .. how about SugarCRM?
Really great news!
Now there will be an instant CMS solution for symfony2 available. That's a big step for symfony2 to rule the (php) world.
That's a great news. Wishing best for Symfony2...
Great news.. Symfony is rocking always
This is good news. Who's next ?! Zend!?
this is good news, it will allow communities to different cms to come together on one goal, to enrich the user experiece
As a long-time eZ Publish integrator, many thanks for the warm welcome of the eZ Publish ecosystem into the Symfony family. eZ Publish is already so flexible it can make you dizzy; that's a huge part of its power. Now eZ says its not flexible enough and so we need to employ the Symfony framework. This will be incredible.
Thanks to Fabian and the Symfony contributors for creating such powerful software. I look forward to meeting many of you at Symfony Live 2012 in San Francisco.