Symfony2 meets Drupal 8

March 22, 2012 • Published by Fabien Potencier

When I started working on Symfony2 in late 2006 (no typo here, I first talked about my vision for Symfony2 during Symfony Camp 2007), I had some clear goals for this new major version of Symfony:

create a set of PHP components that are the best building blocks for developping any website (the first component was the event dispatcher that was included in symfony 1.1);
offer the best platform for creating end user products (versus websites); the full-stack framework being a by-product of these components (Silex was a demonstration of that possibility);
design a platform that decidedly revolves around HTTP.

This is the most exciting times for the Symfony community as my dream is slowly but steadily becoming a reality.

It all started during the Symfony Live conference in 2010; Nils Adermann and I talked about the possibility to use Symfony2 for phpBB4. In July 2011, the Midgard CMS team announced that they were transitioning to Symfony2. Then, the Zikula application framework also started to use some of the Symfony2 Components.

Today, I want to officially announce that Drupal will adopt some of the Symfony Components for their upcoming version 8. And I'm not talking about some minor components, they are embracing our vision and they will use the major components that will allow them to build a great low-level architecture for Drupal 8: HttpFoundation, HttpKernel, Routing, EventDispatcher, DependencyInjection, and ClassLoader.

By adopting HttpKernel, Drupal and Symfony projects will become more interoperable. It means that you will be able to easily integrate your custom Symfony applications with Drupal... and vice-versa.

This is a very good news for both communities: they benefit from our code and experience, and they will help us improve what we already have.

If you want to learn more about this announce, you can read Dries blog post on this topic.

Also, don't miss Dries keynote at DrupalCon Denver 2012 where he announced the collaboration with Symfony (and enjoy the great morphing between the Drupal and the Symfony logo):

You can also watch my session on Symfony2 during DrupalCon Denver 2012:

Or just have a look at the slides:

Take a minute to welcome the Drupal community and let's start working together to help them build one of the best CMS for PHP.

Of course, we must continue talking with other Open-Source PHP communities to see how we can collaborate; the ultimate goal being to make as much projects as possible interoperable. Let's try to eliminate the NIH syndrome in the PHP world!

Published in #Case studies #Community

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Comments

Yitzchak Schaffer said on Mar 22, 2012 at 15:41

Wow, a fabulous accomplishment. Félicitations!

Thomas Lallement Certified said on Mar 22, 2012 at 19:19

It's a good news for the PHP community! Symfony2 is an excelent Framework and it's nice to see that widely use CMS can take advantage of it.

Tobias Nyholm Certified said on Mar 22, 2012 at 19:31

What happened with "Don't reinvent the wheel"? Why would you need two PHP frameworks that are pretty similar? Stop developing Drupal, convert some of there modules to Symfony bundles and create a user friendly and well tested CMS bundle.
I do welcome the Drupal developers to our community but I don't see the point why Drupal should be a Symfony-almost-copy.

Roman Ring said on Mar 22, 2012 at 20:47

@Tobias, Drupal is CMS, Symfony2 is CMF. They have completely different niches.

Loïc Caillieux Certified said on Mar 22, 2012 at 21:23

That's really a great news for Symfony and it opens a new era for communication between frameworks and popular, ready to use and open source applications.
By the way, I'm coming back from a small conference about Dailymotion and one of it cofounders, Mr Rappaport.
When telling us about the story of Dailymotion, I asked what kind of collaboration they had with sensiolabs and symfony.
Well... he made me repeat the name of both company and framework and answered me everything was homemade, no symfony inside.
Dailymotion has been of a great value for symfony communication as a first class user, as well as Yahoo answers if I remember.
So, did Mr Rappaport not know about technologies used in Dailymotion, or the part reserved to symfony is minor in front of other technologies, or... could you tell us more on the way symfony evolved since to collaboration with big project / companies, Dailymotion included ?
Aside what we have now - mature and professional framework - I am sure many of us would like to know more on what was tried and given up, what team collaboration helped the framework growing etc... Symfony internals' story.

Tobias Nyholm Certified said on Mar 23, 2012 at 00:02

@Roman, I wouldn't say that Drupal is a CMS. I know they call them self that. The last version of Drupal i tested was version 5. It was not even close to CMS compared to Wordpress at that time. I don't know how the latest version is but I don't think it's more user friendly.

A CMS is a system where all you care about is the content. My mom is the type of person that would like to use a CMS. She doesn't care about programming. And you really have to know 'hard core stuff' (hard core for my mom) to start a Drupal blog. I see that Drupal is a poor CMF or a really poor CMS...

John Fiala said on Mar 23, 2012 at 05:05

@Tobias Well, there you'd be mistaken. Drupal 5 is about 2 major releases ago, and Drupal is a CMS that happily reinvents itself each major release. We just had our latest Drupalcon here in Denver, and had over 3,000 folks joining in and having fun and sharing information. There's a lot of energy and people who use Drupal, and hopefully we can all get together and work on some interesting projects.

David Buchmann said on Mar 23, 2012 at 08:20

congratulations! having worked with drupal 6 and 7 and symfony2, i am amazed by the possibilities that open. symfony2 for serious development and drupal for flexible, browser-based cms empowering the power user. this is a true marriage of leaders!

Loïc Caillieux Certified said on Mar 23, 2012 at 08:56

@Tobias, my first experience with Drupal6 wasn't so happy, I spent a lot of time to do basic operations and for sure I would have been more productive using symfony to do the job. The basics and practices acquired, I tried Drupal 7 and like it every day more and more, it has so many modules that you can do a lot of work without a line of code, and its usability has been totally re-though, you spend more time on contents and seo optimisation than programming and that's why today it makes part of great open source projects, it evolves quickly, and in a good way.
The fact that a common core is shared with symfony is a reall opportunity for joining users and developpers, this is missing to symfony I think.
And afterall, I do believe sometime you have to reinvent the wheel to do it better and open new opportunities, concepts and development schemas. Personnaly, I don't want the web with only one tool doing this, another doing that... there is place for creativity, and I am sure this kind of cooperation will go towards the direction you firstly told about, having backported bundles from Drupal - and others - into the Symfony ecosystem.
One more thing, how many stable bundles for Symfony2, and how many for Drupal7 ?
I am sure that Symfony developers and community will get more from this cooperation than the other way.

Pierre Minnieur Certified said on Mar 23, 2012 at 08:58

#10

very cool and straightforward talk. I hope Drupal 8 and its developers will benefit from a collaboration with Symfony2 and its developers!

Dejan Spasic said on Mar 23, 2012 at 11:21

#11

A quite interesting development! i am really positive surprised.

Daniel Ancuta said on Mar 23, 2012 at 11:54

#12

Great news!

Simone Fumagalli said on Mar 26, 2012 at 10:24

#13

I remember when at the Symfony Live 2010 you announced the cooperation between phpBB and Symfony. How is the work going ? Is there a preview of the new PHPBB4. I can't find that much on the net.

Lukas Kahwe Smith said on Mar 26, 2012 at 15:39

#14

I don't think work on phpBB4 has started. They instead realized that first they need a better solution for dependency management for their modules, which let to 2 of the main devs of phpBB to start work on composer.

They are however looking into adopting some Symfony2 components within their 3.x release cycle.

But yeah in a way the phpBB announcement paved the way to a lot of people seeing Symfony2 with different eyes which is now creating hard facts, while the phpBB4 announcement is still total vaporware :-/

Tony G. said on Mar 26, 2012 at 18:56

#15

@Tobias, the last version of WordPress I tested was 2.0.6. I didn't care for WordPress back then, and I don't see how the current version of WP could be any better today.

Perhaps your Mom would care to create a blog at http://www.drupalgardens.com and see if that is user-friendly enough for her.

How about opening your mind and becoming more informed before you disparage other open source projects in the future?

Matthieu Bellon said on Mar 27, 2012 at 10:30

#16

This is the most promising stuff i've ever heard for a long time. For month I've been playing with both projects trying to benefit from their goodness and get the rid of their drawbacks.
Now we will have a machine that benefit from both. This is superb.

@Tobias : Being rude to a community AND obviously demonstrating that your knowledge about Drupal is clearly outdated is not a mature attitude. Great things has been achieved with Drupal and I think that Symfony also needs Drupal to go a step further.

Cas Leentfaar said on Apr 5, 2012 at 14:02

#17

I saw this in one of Google's results and had to read twice, is this really happening?

Awesome, and congratulations to Fabien and the entire community for their efforts into making this possible! I can only see better things coming from this.

@Tobias
The last version you tested was Drupal 5.0? If I was like that I would never be tempted to make such comments in this topic. I'd fear people not taking me serious or sounding like an arrogant prick.
You are obviously not a fearful guy...