The first version of symfony, a full stack MVC framework for PHP 5.
Symfony is a full-stack PHP MVC framework
Symfony provides an architecture, components and tools for developers to build complex web applications faster. Choosing Symfony allows you to release your applications earlier, host and scale them without problem, and maintain them over time with no surprise.
Symfony is based on experience. It does not reinvent the wheel: it uses most of the best practices of web development and integrates some great third-party libraries.
Thousands of developers already trust Symfony for their applications!
Information
This tag is specific for the first version: symfony 1.x. There is also symfony-1.2 and symfony-1.4 for minor version.
Notice that, even if this version of Symfony is very stable and has been used in thousands of applications around the world, it is now outdated and surpassed by the superior symfony2 version. As of November 2012, Symfony1 has reached his end of maintenance. If you are starting a new project, it is recommended that you use symfony2 instead.
As of November 25, 2012 the latest stable release of symfony 1 is version 1.4.20.
Community
New users join the community every day, and that makes Symfony the most popular PHP framework around. A large community means easy-to-find support, user-contributed documentation, plugins, and free applications.
Speed
It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.
The very small number of prerequisites makes Symfony easy to install on any configuration; you just need Unix or Windows with a web server and PHP installed. It is compatible with almost every database system. In addition, it has a very small overhead, so the benefits of the framework don't come at the cost of an increase of hosting costs.
Using Symfony is so natural and easy for people used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications that the learning curve is reduced to less than a day. The clean design and code readability will keep your delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles (such as DRY, KISS or the XP philosophy) and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.
Robust
Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. This means that you have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match your enterprise's development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools helping you to test, debug and document your project.
Last, but not least, by choosing Symfony you get the benefits of an active open-source community. It is entirely free and published under the MIT license.
Symfony is sponsored by Sensio Labs, a French Web agency.
Useful links:
In general:
- Official documentation
#symfonyIRC Channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/symfony)- How to use less memory while running a task in Symfony 1.4?
For a migration/cohabitation with symfony2:
