After more than a year in development, the longly awaited 1.1 version is finally out.

Many blogs wrote with positivity about this release, describing all its new features.

I’have been using Symfony 1.1 from RC1 and I noticed that all developers work is behind the scene, as Fabien say, Symfony 1.1 is a very special framework release.

Furthermore, Symfony 1.2 is on the road ( October 2008), yesterday Fabien started the 1.2 branch and showed in a blog all new symfony 1.2 planned features.

Among all new 1.2 features, the most important and the must-have is the new admin generator with new form framework support.

I will update projects to symfony 1.1 framework, using sfCompat10Plugin, but I will not use the new form subframework in my coming projects until symfony 1.2 will not be released.

Symfony 1.1 has been released, but documentation in insufficient and very poor about form subframework and new features.

I suggest developers that have to respect a project budget, to wait for a little more of documentation and to use symfony 1.1 features for investigations and studies.

This is my humble opinion.

What do you think about this?

Congratulations to the developers team.

Read more if you want to read about new symfony 1.1 features.

Best regards.
Mauro Casula.

Symfony 1.1 new features:

Command Line Utility rewritten from scratch. Now it’s based on a new, totally extensible, Object-Oriented subframework.

As many of you know, the most important enhancement in this new release is the new Form sub system.
From now, form helpers are deprecated. Form are now classes and Form Widgets offer native and easy handling of validation, filling, request binding, CSRF protection, file upload validation.

Plugin manager has been rewritten too. Now supports dependecies between differents plugins.

In symfony 1.1 propel is a plugin, bundled in the lib folder of Symfony 1.1 ( you don’t need to install it ).
Schema structure has been improved: now you can declare behaviours directly in the schema and a schema can overwrite others.

Routing has been improved with a cache layer. Finally we can change ‘/’ character in urls with any character.

Internationalization now has 2 new usefull tasks: i18n:find ( find all strings without __() ) and i18n:extract that find untranslated texts.
I18n now uses the same view caching system and I18n class is not a singleton.

Caching has been impoved too. Now view cache manager accepts wildcards in remove() calls and you can remove the cache from other applications.
Caching factories allow you to use differents caching storage and function cache can now use any caching factory.

YAML parser is now more robust and errors in YAML now throw helpful error messages.
All config.php disappeared: project and application configurations are now classes and other applications can access to them.

Has been written a performance tool and a lot of unit tests ( more of 8000 ).

Another very important point in symfony 1.1 new features is the new event manager inspired by Cocoa.

These are the principal new features of Symfony 1.1 but as Fabien say: the beauty is inside.