The longly awaited 1.1 version is finally out after long months of development. After doing this, Fabien started the 1.2 branch, and you can take a look at that magnificient revision which for sure opens a new era of symfony developments.
A lot of nice new features are greatly awaited in the next version.
First of all, the admin generator will be completely rewritten, to make a good use of the new form framework. That will for sure open incredible new possibilities and remove the permanent need for hacks to customize your own admin interface (or frontend interface, if you do use admin generation in frontend too). At least, the first one amazed more than one person, and we can be pretty sure that new version will kick asses.
Some people were complaining about Ruby on Rails having a great advantage over symfony, by their deployment tool Capistrano, while symfony only allow to rsync to one server. Hopefully this won’t be true for long anymore. For information, Capistrano allows to create real deployment scripts, like “Disable frontend app on this server, make backups of site and database, synchronize, remotely run tests, clear the cache and enable the frontend app”. That will easify a lot our projects delivery procedures.
Amongst some other details, the last major point Symfony 1.2 will see is some further decoupling of the technical choices symfony 1.0 gave us, like Propel or Prototype. Prototype and the helpers will still be bundled with symfony, but as a plugin, like Propel is since 1.1. This is very important IMHO, because symfony should never force any technical choice to the teams. But many people complained that helpers was one of the easy and magic things that attract newcomers to symfony. The plugin solution is keeping everyone happy. In the same spirit, symfony 1.2 will bundle the sfDoctrine plugin thanks to Jonathan Wage work to stabilise and manage branches/features.
And for the short term, the unpublished chapters of the form framework online book are still to come too, along with a symfony 1.1 “First project” tutorial.
Long life to symfony 
