Symfony2 and Drupal 8

There have been some discussion around net about Drupal‘s future. I don’t know where the discussion started from and is core Drupal developers included or is it only some Drupal users who is giving their opinions. Anyway, I like the idea and wanted therefore blog few words about it.

I think all started when popular PHP based forum Software phpBB announced that in their next major version they will use Symfony2 framework. I think it’s great news because of Symfony2 seems to awesome framework and it should ease the use phpBB forum as part of symfony project. I actually had once Symfony 1.0 project where we needed forum functionality. We started with Simple Machine Forum and first integrated authentication mechanism to other parts of the site. When the project grown we needed deeper integration with forum and other functionality and that time it was easier to replace SMF with homegrown forum than try to make deeper migration. Hope in future these kind of integrations with phpBB should be easier because of the same platform.

Symfony2 looks very promising framework and I think both communities could benefit if Drupal 8 would be build top of Symfony2. Symfony seems to have strong and very skilled community, but it is missing commonly accepted CMS functionality. There is actually few different CMS solutions build by Symfony community but all of them seems to miss functionality or user base if you compare them to Drupal. In turn Drupal is far from pleasant to develop custom functionality when compared to Symfony’s clean architecture. They have recently created some framework like features to their code base like new database abstraction in Drupal 7. All these looks quite hack if compared to Symfony’s well designed framework.

In my company we are using both Drupal and Symfony. Drupal is user for normal websites where we need complete CMS and Symfony is user for projects where we have heavy custom made business logic. Of course there is always edge cases where it is not clear which one should suite better. If Drupal would use Symfony as their framework this decision should be easier.

So my vote goes to Symfony2 for Drupal 8 :)