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We're starting a project right now and we wanted to know what's the best course: use Symfony 2, even though it's not stable and final, or use Symfony1 and upgrade later?

j0k
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VinnyX
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4 Answers4

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I would recommend to start with Symfony2 : migrating from Symfony 1 to 2 will be very difficult, Symfony2 nearly being a totally different framework.

I have to add that even migrating between minor versions of Symfony 1 can be a real pain.

Maxime Pacary
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    Definitely Sf2, it's fundamentally different than sf1, making upgrades quite like rewriting from scratch. – Maerlyn May 02 '11 at 16:51
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I sort of agree with Frosty but, i have just started a project and elected to do it in 1.4 because.

  • I already have a lot of code blocks and whole modules i can reuse and time is of the essence
  • S2 is not stable and what i am doing needs to be stable from day one
  • Documentation for S2 while good is not at the same level as that for S1.x
  • A lot of the plugins for S2 are works in progress whereas many of those for S1.x are solid and again well documented
  • Speed performance is not an issue so S2's gains are no help to me
  • The client does not care as long as they get a deliverable
  • S1.x (well 1.4) will be supported until end of 2012, over 18 months which is often a lot longer than the average life of a pice of software, especially in the web arena
  • There is not native admin backend and i really need one that just works
  • In 6 to 12 months in can reverse engineer, by hand, this project fully working and tested in S2.x with oodles of documentation to hand
  • Fabpot is a very clever guy and will probably have written a script to convert 1.4 to 2.x so i don't have to worry (ok perhaps he won't but all the other hold)

The above boils down to yes S2 is probably stable enough and the documentation is useable and if you have enough time to go up the learning curve but it will depend on individual cases as to which way the cookie crumbles.

PurplePilot
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  • +1 for pointing out good reasons to stick in some cases with Sf 1.4, even if I disagree about any "migration ease" :) – Maxime Pacary May 02 '11 at 19:04
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    No i think you are spot on as the architecture, bundles and name spaces are so different plus any sort of scripting would require that no-one had written shortcuts, cheats, hacks or just plain "got things a bit wrong but it worked" in their code. So i don't foresee ease of upgrading. It's a rewrite plain and simple and that needs to be factored in when the decision is made. Actually i am a bit hacked off that i cannot do it in S2 but commercially it made no sense – PurplePilot May 02 '11 at 19:26
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IN few words... Impossible. We asked Mr. Fabien Potencier something like... "Will be possible to migrate from symfony1 to symfony2?". His answer was much short than mine... NO.

Symfony2 has nothing to do with Symfony1. Only share name, no more. Start new project in SF2, try to understand how it works and you will be able to mantain project with new features.

Migrate is bad...

Marc Morera Merino
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    +1 for "Symfony2 has nothing to do with Symfony1". Really, Fabien has no business calling it Symfony2. It's selfish and misleading. – Raise Dec 19 '11 at 22:37
  • I'd suspect he said "Non!". I just read this while trying to decide what to do with a Symfony 1.2 project that runs well. The lack of upgrade path has me thinking of Django, I do prefer Python to PHP. – Peter Wooster Jan 21 '13 at 13:26
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2019 Update

It seems this question is still active in 2019. Nowadays there are new technologies, that can automate all PHP-related work.

Thanks to tools like:

  • php-parser
  • Rector - a tool I wrote to automate PHP migrations and refactorings

you can:

  • prepare rules to A → B migration
  • then run it on your code base
  • it will change all the patterns there, no matter if 10 k lines of 1 000 k lines

See a more detailed answer.


Let me know if you need more specific answer tailored to your project.

Tomas Votruba
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