Symfony News

Symfony 2014 Year in Review: Symfony Documentation

2014 has been the busiest year in the entire history of the Symfony Documentation thanks to the amazing work of our documentation managers (Ryan Weaver, Christian Flothmann and Wouter De Jong) and the hundreds of documentation contributors.

This year, we introduced a new book about Symfony Best Practices, we revamped the Quick Tour tutorial for Symfony newcomers and we improved the internal documentation build process. We also started to integrate a new tutorial written by Fabien Potencier about How to Create your Own Framework. This tutorial is still in the process of being merged into the documentation, but you can see its original revision on Fabien's blog.

All in all, this is the top 10 list of most popular documentation pages in 2014:

1. Databases and Doctrine, the book chapter that explains how to configure databases, add mapping information, query for objects, define entity relationships and configure Doctrine events.
2. Forms, the book chapter about building Symfony forms, handling form submissions, validate forms, customize form rendering, creating form classes, etc.
3. The Big Picture, the first part of the Quick Tour tutorial for Symfony newcomers.
4. Installing and Configuring Symfony, the book chapter that explains in detail how to install Symfony, how to create your first Symfony application and how to solve the most common problems that you may face. This chapter has recently been rewritten from scratch.
5. Creating and Using Templates, the book chapter about template naming and location for Symfony applications, linking to assets, including CSS and JavaScript, etc.
6. Security, the book chapter about firewalls, access controls, login forms, password encoding, user management, ACLs, etc.
7. Routing, the book chapter about defining routes, adding variables to URLs, defining route requirements, generating URLs, debugging routes, etc.
8. Controller, the book chapter about mapping URLs to controllers, redirectig, managing errors and 404 pages, creating static pages, etc.
9. Validation, the book chapter about form validation, built-in constraints, constraint targeting, validation groups, etc.
10. How to Use Assetic for Asset Management, the cookbook that explains how to include, compile, combine and minimize CSS stylesheets and JavaScript files.

What's next?

In 2015 we want to consolidate and simplify the installation instructions for the Symfony framework and reduce documentation duplications by moving some book contents to their corresponding components chapters.

We also want to make the contributing experience as easy as possible, by using automatic review bots and providing documentation previews for pending PRs. We hope this will make it easier to reduce the pending issues backlog to less than 100 issues. We also have to make some decisions about how to deal with documentation translations.