We have used a number of PHP frameworks for our PHP projects, both internally and for clients, from roll-our-own frameworks to open-source frameworks. A few years back, we fell instantly in love when we discovered Mojavi for its simplicity and solid implementation. Then the deal became even sweeter when symfony was born. To put it plainly, symfony is to PHP what Rails is to Ruby. It takes the best of Mojavi, Rails, Propel, Ajax and tons of other frameworks and best practices and rolls them into a very effective, practical and well-documented framework. Since its launch, symfony has built up quite a large following, which goes to show how good the framework really is.

We believe symfony can only get better. One of the new additions to the symfony website is a Code Snippets section, which is a code repository for fellow symfony users to post fragments of codes for popular tasks. This is definitely a great resource for users of the framework which we have not seen elsewhere before. And the developers have even released the source code to Snippets so that new users can take the code and learn how to develop such a web application on their own. That’s the spirit that really draws us in to symfony.

Since we started using symfony in a few of our projects, we have also started building up some code fragments that we will readily share with the community. For starters, here’s one on how to send batch emails through symfony.

Many frameworks have come and gone, but symfony has managed to garner a positive reputation for being practical, straightforward and fun to use. Add to that the fact that it is the most well-documented framework in the PHP landscape, symfony is definitely here to stay for a long time.