I’d like to start talking about the symfony framework with the question to you.
Do you really need it? I mean is there the strong reason why you decided to use Symfony? I spent quite long time looking for a good PHP framework. Of course I have a couple of
hand-written frameworks which I used for a long time and sometimes they saved my ass (I’m talking about the cases when I need a project today which had to be ready yesterday).
This is MVCMS – the oldest one framework which I’ve developed at the dark medieval times when PHP4 was just starting to become popular and noone knows about all those PHP5’s advantages:
http://www.narkozateam.com/mvcms/mvcms.html
I was young and full of willing to implement MVC paradign anyhow just to make sure it
works (and just as a side comment – finally, I turned out that MVCMS is not MVC in fact).
After that there were a couple of efforts to build valueable frameworks which would save project development time up to zero days. Of course I built up good and they helped me but I always felt that if I could get support of php developers community – framework will be much better.
Yeah, there were always existed PEAR and frameworks like that.. But that was more like set of ready solutions and not monolite framework.
I think “x” time happened when PHP5 has appeared. After that number of frameworks
have been starting to grow and right now:
http://www.coldscripts.com/PHP/Scripts/Development/Frameworks
I would like to underline 2 of those frameworks – CakePHP and Symfony.
Symfony provides a lot of features seamlessly integrated together, such as:
- simple templating and helpers
- cache management
- smart URLs
- scaffolding
- multilingualism and I18N support
- object model and MVC separation
- Ajax support
- enterprise ready
And in fact, that is not the full list. It’s quickly developing and there is really big interesting from community side, so you can find a lot of usefull comments and advices on symfony forum.