KnpIpsum: Symfony2 Tutorial Project Builder

May 16, 2011 − Symfony2 is a great framework, but now we need to show this greatness to the rest of the world: here we're introducing a new Symfony2 edition which can be used as a base for your project or as base for a tutorial to understand how you can use some of the best bundles around.

UPDATE − December 16th

With the arrival of composer we have changed what KnpIpsum is to make it a demo application of popular bundles.

We have also released a Symfony Tutorial as a screencast on our brand new KnpUniversity platform!

Introduction

Symfony2 is a great framework.

Fabien has done a tremendous job with it.
At his side, the community is releasing more and more impressive bundles.
So yeah, life is beautiful.

Spreading the Symfony

A lot of early adopters are already convinced by Symfony2's quality.

Now we need to show this to the rest of the world, and I know that a lot of people are working toward this goal.

I'll speak a bit about what I know and give a few more details about what we're trying to achieve here at Knp.

What's up, doc?

Ryan Weaver (head of KNP in the US) is helping a lot: he's responsible for the documentation of the symfony project, and he is spending a ton of time on it. With the help of people like fabpot, n8v, blue-eyes, stof, hhamon, lsmith77, schmittjoh, bschussek, johnkary (and others!) the documentation is really starting to look good.

And that's a very important step for Symfony2's diffusion.

A more complete distribution to learn by example

Symfony2 comes in different distributions (a preconfigured skeleton app).
Until now, the official Symfony Standard distribution is the only distribution we're aware of, and it's great!

But today we want to introduce a first version of our own distribution called "KnpIpsum" with two important goals:

• KnpIpsum is a customizable Symfony2 edition with some of the bundles we love the most: just choose the ones you want before downloading your distribution, and they will be pre-installed and configured inside the archive you download.

• We're writing code examples and demos for each of these bundles and the most important features. It is a base for the tutorial we're writing.

Work in progress

Don't worry if your bundle is not there yet: if there's enough demand we'll be adding more of them, perhaps the Sonata Admin and media bundles, paginators, DoctrineExtensinons, RestBundle, Doctrine ODM, Propel, UserBundle, MessageBundle, TwitterBundle, …

For now we have put together some small straightforward code examples for each of these bundles so that you can understand easily how each works.

That's just the beginning, but right now we already feel that KnpIpsum could help newcomers discover how they can use bundles like AsseticBundle, DoctrineBundle, ImagineBundle, fixtures, BehatBundle… We hope this will be the case!

We have tried to separate every feature into different pages / controller calls so that it can be read and used step by step like a tutorial. That's also something we plan to improve in the coming weeks.

Once again, there are definitely a few bugs left and a lot of things to improve.
We'll do our best to fix this in the coming weeks, but please be nice :)

Thank you

Although our team has put a lot of time in compiling this and writing examples, you'll have to thank fabpot for the original standard distribution we have based our work on, and all the awesome developers who develop and maintain such great bundles.