Admittedly, we were a little bit nervous to hold our first lecture, but what better subject than a mini-round-up of the PHP frameworks that we have used, including a quick introduction as to why we love Symfony?
Symfony2 can be a little bit complex, and certainly daunting if you have looked at everything it can do. We strongly believe that a bit of effort can save you countless hours in development time in the future.
We use Symfony2 at the core of every web-application we build, we would be hard-pushed to seriously consider any other framework. We love its power and flexibility; how you can bundle your modules, and loosely integrate them into multiple projects; how we have invested so much time into reusable code, and how it can pay off in the long term; and we especially love the community.
We have open-sourced many of our tools and modules, these can be found on our GitHub page. We’ve recently had some fun at the Leicester Civic Hack by using Symfony to build our project ‘Mista Bus’. The source for this can be found here.
One of the things we feel needs attention, however, is the lack of a Symfony community in and around Leicestershire. One of our aims is to spread the word about the framework, and be a mentor and assist new developers who share our passion.
You can find the slides from our lecture here.
We are also going to be running a free* Symfony Workshop in May this year, so keep your eyes peeled for any updates on our Twitter page, you can follow it here. We are hoping to take the intermediate PHP developer or newbie Symfony developer on a journey that will be perilous, challenging and extremely satisfying.
*We are going to try everything in our power to enable the workshop to be free, although this comes with a caveat that if a PHP agency fills up the seats entirely, we may consider charging for them to ensure that there will always be seats available to individual developers and the community.
