Where can i find more documentation / tutorials about Symfony?

Question

I'm using Symfony for a month now, and I think it's great, but there certainly is a lack of documentation on some parts of the framework (the admin generator for example).

The basic documentation (Jobeet, More with Symfony, and so on) is great and allows you to develop a basic website in no time.

But:

1. I'm using Symfony 1.4 and Doctrine and most of the things I find on the Internet are about earlier versions of the framework and propel.
2. I sometimes spend minutes just looking for a basic helper (Google search results are not that accurate when it comes to Symfony)
3. I often find myself manually browsing through the jobeet tutorial to find a specific explanation, since Google didn't return me anything useful

I'd like to be more efficient and spend less time googling and more time coding.

Are there any good websites, blogs, google groups or mailing lists you know about and that are of great help?

Answer 1

Foreword: since stackoverflow won't let me post more than one URL, I've regrouped a bunch of useful URLs on this pastie: http://pastie.org/788073

You could try the symfony-user mailing list or the IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/symfony) for near-real-time help.

There are also a number of good quality blogs out there although maybe not covering subjects of interest for you (or you'd have to digg through archives). Providing a full list would take too much time but you can start subscribing to these ones and find new exciting sources of informations through them.

Or try random blogs on the symfony bloggers page

As for Doctrine specific help, have you tried Doctrine's website? The documentation there can be very helpful!

Ultimately, the best source of documentation is (for symfony as for any other opensource project) the source code itself. I would recommend using a source instropection capable IDE, if that's not the case already, and dive through the code. That way you'll truly begin to master symfony :-)

ps: stack overflow itself can be very useful to get fast answers :-)

Answer 2

I agree with Geoffrey's links and would like to add two that I have found to be quite useful:

http://stereointeractive.com/blog/

and

http://redotheweb.com/ (not updated anymore but still contains some insightful posts namely the one comparing propel, doctrine and sfPropelFinder http://redotheweb.com/2008/07/08/comparing-propel-doctrine-and-sfpropelfinder/)

The official API documentation for Symfony often seems quite lacking but is a good starting point.

Answer 3

I'm in the same boat, trying to get to grips with Symfony 1.4 w/Doctrine.... about a few weeks in now. The documentation is quite limited, but I've noticed that you can find a lot of stuff on the Symfony website if you just dig a little bit. The lack of organisation of the material is the main problem.

What I've done is read through the "Definitive Guide (2007)" which is a decent starting point, and because the Propel stuff only really affects the model layer, it's quite easy to read it and mentally translate it into Doctrine. I also found it useful to learn Propel syntax basics just to be able to read more Symfony stuff.

And then, often, there's documentation for Symfony 1.0/1.1/1.2 where basics are covered, but the same documentation was never made available for 1.4 in a comprehensive way. I've still found it useful to dip into these, bearing in mind of course that some of it may be badly outdated and obsolete.

Funnily enough, I've not read through carefully through either the Jobeet or Askeet tutorials, just because it became quickly obvious that the tutorials are very selective about what they teach. They pretty much require background understanding of Symfony, or that you'd been a Symfony user for many years.

I've found the Symfony forum quite useless, mainly because it's so slow to get replies. On Stackoverflow I can post something and have an answer in 10 minutes. On the Symfony forum, it's more like 10 days... or never! :)

The Doctrine Google group I think is equally useless, so I just use the Doctrine guide for some finer details.

And FINALLY, I've got a few friends who are experienced with Symfony. Just knowing that their help is available if I get stuck is very comforting.

Hope that helps! Just wanted to share my experience.

EDIT: Was looking for something and came across this... 103 slides of sf + doctrine from jwage himself... something to throw into the mix: http://www.slideshare.net/jwage/symfony-13-doctrine-12

Answer 4

I would like to add two valuable resources:

• The tutorials category on the official blog
• The A week of Symfony series, that always include (to the end of the articles) a section called They talked about us, that include a weekly recopilation of articles, tutorials, reviews, benchmarks, etc.

Answer 5

There is an open source project named bookeet which is similar to jobeet. You can browser all of the source code.

It is built from zero and it is getting more and more features (which jobeet doesn't have). For example: markdown editor, form embeded, user registration ...etc.