The first day of december started well: It meant the release of the new symfony 1.2.0 version. Aside from the additions and improvements in the code, this new branch of symfony also reinstates an old tradition in symfony: It comes paired with a huge amount of documentation in many forms. Let's have a look at what symfony 1.2 has to offer.

Last week I attended this year's fall edition of the International PHP Conference in Mainz, Germany. Aside from speaking there, I attended quite a few sessions, and met up with a lot of people from the community. I had a great time, and definitely learned quite some interesting stuff.

I made a schedule up-front and even though usually I hardly follow such a schedule, at this conference I actually did for the most part. The reason I usually don't follow the schedule is because I want to meet people and tight conference schedule's make that impossible. The International PHP Conference luckily offers enough and long enough breaks to meet up with people and talk to them.

A community around an open source project is always good. Talking to people in the community can give you support, or you can give back to the community by supporting others. But meeting the community in real life - and especially the people behind the project - gives it a whole new dimension. You can put names to faces, and make new friends. For symfony, the best moment for this is SymfonyCamp, a symfony-focused event in The Netherlands.

In May, I helped organize the Dutch PHP TestFest in my position as board member of the Dutch PHP User Group. This dutch event, which was sponsored by Ibuildings, was part of the global PHP TestFest initiative, which aims to get a higher test coverage for the PHP language and with that stabilize the language even more - something that will benefit all users of PHP. Back in May, we already deemed our event a big success with 10 attendees, a great presentation by Sebastian Bergmann and a huge number of tests written. But it turns out to be an even bigger success...

The official stable release of symfony 1.1 is now nearly a month old, and response so far has been fairly positive. This is not surprising, as this new version adds a lot of flexibility to the already flexible system that symfony offered. Let's have a look at symfony 1.1, and specifically to the points that I feel are especially exciting in this new release.

"Code refactoring is any change to a computer program's code that improves its readability or simplifies its structure without changing its results." - Wikipedia

I've met quite a bunch of developers that felt refactoring was a waste of time. "Why would you write code only to change the code at a later point? Why not just write the code perfectly in the first place?" or "You're writing code for the same functionality over and over again, isn't that a waste of time?"

I hope to prove to you that there is much power in refactoring, but with power comes responsibility.

It seems a trend lately amongst open source projects to get their users to contribute together during a day. For the symfony framework, today is such a day, and 58 people have signed up to help the symfony framework make a big step forwards. Thanks to Ibuildings, I am one of those 58.

I am using my full workday today to help symfony. From fixing bugs to extending the functionality of plugins to updating documentation, everything gets to be done today. I have already fixed a bug in the example code of the Easy Ajax tutorial. And currently I am working on extending the functionality of the sfSimpleForumPlugin, a plugin that allows people to set up a forum inside their symfony project with a few clicks.

On a regular basis, Ibuildings employees give internal presentations or workshops to share knowledge or present something they are enthusiastic about. Yesterday evening I was able to give a presentation to quite a nice group of my colleagues about the symfony framework. The evening was split up in two parts.

The first part was approximately an hour, in which I presented a non-technical overview of what symfony is. In the second part, I gave a short theoretical introduction into symfony from a more technical standpoint, after which those present actually got to work with symfony a bit.