phpBB Weekly

Session: Symfony & phpBB by Stefan Koopmanschap
Date/Time: Friday 8/20 at 10:25-11:15 AM

This post contains my rough crib-notes from this presentation at Libertyvasion 2010. The post has not been proof-read for spelling, grammar, or accuracy.

The talk will be about the two different projects, and how they’re different & similar, and about the communities around phpBB and Symfony. Will then focus on how the communities can come together, and closing with how to actually contribute to the process.

Stefan Koopmanschap runs a freelance business as a software engineer, consultant, and trainer. He’s a former Support Team Leader (and is celebrating his 5th anniversary of not being ST Leader), and is the Symfony Community Manager.

The Projects
phpBB & Symfony are quite different from each other. phpBB is forum software, aimed mainly at end-users, who can take it, install it, and run their own discussion forums. There are of course extras you can do with MODs & styles, but in the end, the purpose of phpBB is to download it, put it on your hosting server, and have it running. And that’s it. Under the hood, most of the code in phpBB has been written from scratch (could be a good or bad thing). With phpBB, there’s hardly any technical knowledge required (good thing).

Symfony is not an end-user product. There is no screenshot of Symfony; Stefan is showing a screenshot of code. It’s a framework for PHP development. You download it, and start working on top of the Symfony code to write your own application. There’s a completely different audience for this software: developers with technical knowledge. “Even with a framework, you can still write crappy code. But at least it helps to have a solid base of code on top of which you can build your stuff. But it’s not an excuse to still write crappy code.” But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and write everything from scratch. Saves a lot of time & bugs.

The Communities
phpBB’s community is mostly end-users: people that download it and install it. Also a large group of designers for phpBB, and a relatively small group of developers involved. Downside of having lots of end-users: a fair number of trolls are thrown in there as well.

The Symfony community is quite different. Other than the coincidence that his picture of Symfony users doesn’t have people smiling (while phpBB’s does), there is a bit of a more serious developer atmospheres. Also fewer trolls, because developers seem to know to look at the documentation. The questions are also quite different, less “How do I install Symfony?” Symfony community is very open to new people.

Bridging the Gap
Because phpBB wants to use Symfony 2 for phpBB4, the two communities will also have to learn to interact. Advantages: More developers in both communities. phpBB having a strong code base is important, since it will allow the developers to focus on the actual code that makes phpBB what it is. The code in the Symfony core has already been closely tested & maintained by the Symfony developers. From the Symfony point of view, phpBB will be a really big use-case because of the size of the community and project using the Symfony framework. This may also help show other open-source projects the success of building them on top of a framework, instead of writing everything from scratch.

Speaking of bridges, having phpBB4 on Symfony will allow much more closer integration with other sites & applications built on the Symfony framework with less hacking. Will also make integration of phpBB MODs much easier, with less hacking of the core code.

phpBB is usually aimed more for small communities, not so much at corporate environments. Symfony, however, is utilized more heavily by large corporate/enterprise environments. Bringing the two together will help both projects open up to new markets.

Helping Out
We need to support each other. Symfony users/developers don’t know much about phpBB, and many in phpBB don’t know much about Symfony. We need to help each other get to know each other’s products.
Of course, you can contribute code. To work with phpBB4 code, you’ll have to learn Symfony code, and really dig into it. You can then submit bugfixes or contribute code by forking the Symfony Git repository. MODs may need to be ported to work with Symfony & phpBB4, which is where experienced developers may be able to help out.
And there’s lots of other ways: Writing documentation, a blog post, or just promoting how you work with Symfony.

Concluding
It’s great that both communities are going to work together. Also, now that both are using Git, working together will be much easier going forward. There will be a blog post by Stefan about this presentation on Stefan’s blog.

Q&A
Symfony 2.0 “will be done when it’s done,” but is not stable to develop off of right now. There won’t be much of a smooth transition out of 1.4 to 2.0 because they’re completely different products & architectures.
Yuriy asks if there will be a security audit of Symfony — Fabien’s answer is “Sure, why not?” However the main concern is that security issues are likely caused by code built on top of the Symfony framework.