As you may know, we have been working for a very long time on the next stable version of symfony. Now the day has come to celebrate the immediate availability of the long awaited 1.1 stable release of the symfony framework!

Fabien, the core team, and contributors have achieved a tremedous amount of work to provide a full set of exciting new features. We have already talked a lot about them, but one more time, here is what you get in symfony 1.1:

  • The new architecture of symfony is more configureable and decoupled, allowing you to use or replace part of the framework very easily,
  • The new object-oriented form framework makes form creation and reuse a breeze,
  • The brand new task system allows to quicly make extensible batch scripts and command line utilities,
  • Symfony has now a decent YAML parser, with verbose error reporting,
  • The new plugin manager is now compatible with the PEAR standard API, handles plugins dependencies, and provides options for a better control on what you install,
  • The formats handling system can make your app behave and respond differently whether an iPhone, a bot, or a browser is requesting it,
  • The Propel 1.2 ORM is now bundled as a plugin, which means you can very easily switch to Doctrine or even to Propel 1.3 if you prefer,
  • The bundled sfCompat10Plugin will ensure that your 1.0 based projects will still work after having upgraded to 1.1!
  • The routing is now cached, so you can expect a significant performance boost when you got plenty of routes in your app. Also, the routing class is no more a singleton so you can now extend and reference it easily to fit your needs,
  • Even if that's not really a feature, more than 8,500 unit and functional tests guarantee the overall stability of the framework codebase. We doubled the number of tests between 1.0 and 1.1!

Installing and updating symfony

To install symfony 1.1 via PEAR, you have now to explicitely declare the version you want to install. So, if you want to install the 1.1.0 version stable, you must run: 

$ pear install symfony/symfony-1.1.0

Whereas if you want the 1.0 version stable: 

$ pear install symfony/symfony-1.0.17

If you prefer to download a standalone archive, grab the symfony-1.1.0.tgz or the symfony-1.1.0.zip archive and uncompress it somewhere on your disk.

If you are new to symfony, maybe the simplest solution is to download the sandbox :

And if you are a SVN afficionado, just checkout the 1.1 branch:

$ svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/branches/1.1/ /path/to/symfony

Everything else is explained in great details in the symfony installation guide.

Upgrading your existing symfony projects

If you plan to upgrade an existing symfony 1.0 based app to use the brand new 1.1 version, please read carefully the UPGRADE file bundled in every distributed package and versionned in the SVN repository. If you are currently using symfony RC2 in your project, just be sure to run the symfony project:upgrade command just after having updated the symfony library.

As a side note regarding the symfony repository (which has just passed the 10.000th commit), and because we have today two stable versions of symfony (1.0 and 1.1), the trunk directory has been removed.

Regarding the documentation

The whole documentation has been updated to reflect the changes between symfony 1.0 and this new release. The community has surpassed all our expectations by contributing translated resources in 10 new languages in less than 15 days!

We have added a lot of useful tips in the cookbook and the fourth first chapters of the book for the new forms framework are available. The API documentation can also helps you finding easily what you need in the whole symfony codebase.

Maintenance

Symfony 1.1, as a transition release, will be maintained for one year starting from today, whereas 1.0 will still be supported until January 2010.

Next releases

Fabien and the core team have already begun working on the future 1.2 milestone, which will be date driven and no more feature-driven. Also, release cycles will be drastically shorten. You can expect interesting features and improvements to come in this next release, beginning with the brand new admin generator based on the new forms system provided by symfony 1.1. More information on this topic are to come, so stay tuned but please enjoy this new 1.1 version first ;-)

Thanks

We would like to address a special big thanks to Fabian Lange, who has done a fantastic work on symfony recently. Also, kudos to Carl Vondrick and Dustin Whittle for their very appreciated work on symfony.

And last but not least, the biggest thank will go to you, the symfony user community, for the growing interest in the project, for your contributions and for making symfony better and more widespread, day after day, so, one more time: thank you.

Published in #Releases