December 29, 2017 Javier Eguiluz

The end of the year is the best time to review all that we achieved as a community during the past twelve months. These are some of the highlights of the 2017 year for the Symfony Project.

Releases¶ We released three new feature versions: 3.3.0, 3.4.0 (the last 3.x version and a long term support release) and 4.0.0. In addition, 85 maintenance versions were released in 7 different branches (2.7, 2.8, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 and 4.0). We published 71 New in Symfony blog posts, 29 for Symfony 3.3 features and 32 for Symfony 3.4 features (which are also the new features of Symfony 4.0).

Symfony Components¶ On September 5th, the Symfony Components crossed a huge landmark, the 1 billionth download, and became the project with most downloads in PHP history. At the time of writing this blog post, the pseudo-real time download stats show more than 1.2 billion downloads, with four components averaging more than 100,000 daily downloads and the three most downloaded components are: EventDispatcher, Console and Yaml. In 2017 we added four new components: DotEnv, WebLink, Lock and Polyfill PHP 7.2. We also published our first non-PHP "component" called Webpack Encore which bridges Symfony applications with modern JavaScript based tools to manage and process web assets.

Symfony 4¶ The biggest news for Symfony in 2017 was the Symfony 4 release. Symfony 4 is not just a new major Symfony version; it's an entirely reimagined development experience. Symfony 4 is twice as fast than Symfony 3.4 and it uses 70% less code when creating a new application. It also boosts your productivity with service autowiring and the automation provided by Symfony Flex.

Diversity¶ The real success of a project is best measured by its community: the people working on/with the project. The biggest challenge for Symfony as a community is how to increase its diversity. That's why on November we announced the diversity initiative, led by Lukas Kahwe Smith. You'll hear about diversity a lot in 2018 with multiple specific and actionable initiatives.