After more than one year since symfony 1.0 was released, symfony 1.1 goes more and more mature each day. Recent RC releases are a proof of it, but many people are still concerned about whether or not they should migrate.
Documentation?
Many people are complaining about the fact it lacks documentation. In fact, it seems that many people fears that because François announced he was leaving the symfony core team, nobody would take care of documenting the project.
But that’s something any big open-source project come to see one day, a former or important team member leaves the project, because he or she doesn’t have anymore time for it, differ views, change interest, or whatever else.
As he said, no-one is irreplaceable, and new people comes in too, hopefully. Developpers from many countries started recently to fix and translate existing documentation for symfony 1.1, a new mailing list is being created for documentors and the symfony core team is currently putting a great effort on it too.
Documentation!
The symfony documentation page is split by version and language, and the 1.1 english version is getting attention to adapt parts of it in the need. But even without that, if you know symfony 1.0 pretty well, you should not have hard time to updating, as every changed part were because they were judged too complex, or not “clean” enough. The new way to do things is usually easier.
To demonstrate it, people from symfony core team published a little serie of articles on symfony-project.org recently:
- Nicolas Perriault published an article about form internationalization, something you could not do to do so easily with symfony 1.0 helpers.
- Fabien Potencier demonstrated how handy was the new sf_format feature, to provide the same logical content within different formats, or for instance, different views. He also explained how to customize a project’s directory structure, showing the use of ApplicationConfiguration and ProjectConfiguration classes.
- Carl Vondrick explained how to use Propel 1.3 to boost your ORM layer performances (be aware though that PHP 5.2 is needed, while symfony 1.1 only requires PHP 5.1.4).
- I published two little tutorials about sending emails and using tasks.
And more are to come, of course!
And about forms?
The only part of symfony which needs a bit of learning is the new form framework, which is quite radically different from the 1.0 way to create form. And about this, Fabien recently announced he will publish an entire book about it.
To migrate or not to migrate
Symfony 1.0 is Long Term Support version, which means that symfony team will go on fixing bugs for three years since the original release. If your project is nearly released or already released, I would not bother upgrading, because you would not benefit of symfony 1.1 new features, while you’d suffer the upgrade process.
On the other hand, if your project is very young, I think the time to take the step is now, the official 1.1 release being real soon. You’d benefit of all new features with a very active community and a very reactive development team.
