March 20, 2013 Ryan Weaver

Hi guys! It's a great time to be in the world of Symfony! Symfony 2.2 is out, Symfony 2.3 (the first LTS) is around the corner, and we're looking forward to the release of more projects that use Symfony components, like Drupal 8 and Laravel 4. So far, we have two big conferences scheduled this year, including Symfony Live Portland, whose partially-released schedule is already amazing, including topics on Laravel, security, caching, the HttpKernel and more. See you there!

Beyond all that, there's a lot of real work being done on the core code and the documentation. The first commit to the Symfony documentation was over 3 years ago, and since then, we've grown to include a full book, lots of cookbook entries, and sections for most of the individual components. Almost 500 people have contributed, including a group that helps every single day to review pull requests.

But as we grow, we want to stay aggressive and continue to improve the quality of the docs. This means ensuring that code examples are accurate and pages are easy to understand, balancing the info you need with excess technical clutter. It means adding links between topics so that if there's more to know, you can dig in. Improving the docs means making entries shorter when possible, adding missing reference details, and making sure that we're recommending the best possible solutions.

And this is where we need your help! Whether you're a seasoned-Symfony veteran, a beginner, or even if you don't think your English is very good, we'd like you to join us on March 30th for our first ever Symfony Docs Hack Day. Here are the details:

When:

March 30th from 9am Central European Time to 5pm Eastern Standard Time

Where:

We'll meet on IRC at #symfony-docs on Freenode

Who:

Hosts weaverryan and WouterJ along with you and all your friends. The Hack Day is for everyone - we need Symfony experts and newcomers. If you're newer to Symfony, you give us a fresh look at the documentation!

And if you're not comfortable with the contributing process, it's no problem: the docs are a great way to start contributing, and we're all very nice and helpful :).

Then What?

Either WouterJ or I will help make sure you have something to do! Our focus will be:

a) Creating pull requests for actionable issues on GitHub;

b) Re-reading certain core documents for accuracy, links that can be added, ease-of-understanding, consistency, and to see if entries can be broken into pieces and made shorter;

c) Add documentation for important and missing configuration options;

d) Add missing "options" and form view "variables" to the form field reference docs.

What else!

If you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions about the documentation or any of this, just drop a comment below. If you're reading this, then you're probably a Symfony user, so the docs are for you, and we like you.

Cheers!