Open-source PHP5 web framework
Aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks by power, control and pleasure.
Symfony Framework
One Review
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When we looked at frameworks 2 years ago, we finally chose Symfony over other frameworks like CakePHP. It follows MVC and several other familiar design patterns. A command-line tool allows you to initialize projects and add modules very quickly. The main draws are: excellent documentation (an official book, various online tutorials and cookbooks), a great, friendly community (mailing list, forums, wiki, etc), and tremendous flexibility (both in how you use symfony and how it can be moulded to fit into any server layout).
The latest 1.2 release was a major refactoring which resulted in more decoupled classes (so you can use just the classes by themselves, similar to the Zend [Non]framework), RESTful routing and much improved forms and validation handling. Plugins allow you to quickly add functionality to an existing project with very little work (there are hundreds of plugins available).
Also in this release, the ORM layer (Propel / Doctrine) and JavaScript helpers are plugins too, allowing you to mix and match what you’d like to use for those layers. There is an admin generator which allows you to create scaffolding or complete backends by editing a config file and running a command-line task. Various caching layers/strategies and scaleability mean some big sites use symfony. Yahoo (Yahoo Bookmarks, delicious, etc) are all built on symfony.