Quo Vadis, KNP Bundles.com ?

Sep 20, 2012 − Learn more about the future of KNP Bundles, one of the de facto standards to look for the right Symfony2 bundle...

With more than 30,000 visits a month, KNP Bundles is one of the de facto standards to look for the right Symfony2 bundle... and its open-source code a good place to learn more about how you can use Symfony. Now you have probably seen some of the changes we've been doing recently at KNP Bundles.com... But do you know everything? And more importantly, what are our short terms plans? What are our long term plans? Will David Tenant come back in the seventh season of Doctor Who? That's what we'll try to answer here.

Step 1 - stability

One of biggest problems was that our code base was quite old, not self explaining and a bit confusing in some parts. That lead to many problems with maintaining code, and introduced many little issues that were hard to find and fix. So me, Evgeniy 'cursedcoder' Guseletov, Luis 'cordoval' Cordova and many other awesome contributors, have been refactoring many parts of code base. That should help beginners who try to get inspiration from KNP Bundles.

Step 2 - re-design

We have introduced a more robust new design for KnpBundles.com. This will ease up the introduction of new features and will be easier to maintain.

Step 3 - short term plan

As you already read, many things have been changed, but many of them still need some work to be fixed and/or extended. Here are some of our ideas for features in case of short term plan:

• simple tagging/categorization to ease up finding interesting bundles
• use the great Assetic for CSS & JS
• show dependencies of bundle, based on its composer.json file
• remember your sorting options in the lists
• re-introduce tweets about trending bundles
• add autocompleter for search box

Step 4 - long term plan

We also have more long term plans which require much more time to be implemented, or some bigger changes in the code base. So here you go, some of our ideas for long term plan:

• documention rendering system for bundles
• extending statistics system, to give more informations about how ecosystem evolves
• re-implement API system
• integration with Travis-CI
• integration with Packagist
• bundle support system
• blog about interesting bundles (inspired by thechangelog.com)

Community voice

Symfony2 is not just a PHP framework, it's also the most awesome community you could meet, ever. And the famous unofficial web resource for Symfony2 bundles could not exists without such community. So we would like to make you, an important part of the changes. If you're interested, we will try to create a serie of articles, in which we will introduce changes, with the pros and cons we see. At the end of such article we will state our point of view, and ask about yours! All voices are important, and all comments will be analyzed and anwsered.

Let the battle begin!

First thing we would like to discuss, is way we handle issues. Most of you know that we have an issue tracker on GitHub, but few of you know that we also have a public board on Trello, because that's the tool we're using on most of our commercial projects. Now it's time to select one of those, mostly because maintaining both is really hard and is leading to out of sync and duplication of issues/features described there.

GitHub issue tracker pros

• available out of box with code source
• well known by community
• simple way to close/mention of particular issues in commits
• we already use [pull requests](https://github.com/KnpLabs/KNP Labs/pulls)

Trello board pros

• more visible progress of: "what's going on right now"
• voting system for cards
• easier way to manage particular issues

As you can see, we found more pros in using GitHub issue tracker for this particular project and we would like to suggest this one for KNP Bundles. So, what's your choice?