The Symfony PHP Framework has, in the past, alienated a lot of developers solely because it was quite a hassle to setup on shared hosting or a local server environment.

What’s new in Symfony 2.0?

• Requires PHP5.3.2+
• Doctrine 2 (Active Record is replaced by Entity Pattern, completely rewritten codebase for PHP5.3)
• PHPUnit for testing, lime is out for good
• Logging and caching with Zend Framework
• Access to remote APIs (web services, feeds, etc.)
• Support for Lucene indexes
• PDf generation
• Queueing
• Cloud computing (storage, DBs, message queues)
• Forms2, the new form framework
• Web Debug Toolbar

You can setup the symfony 2.0 sandbox on a local server in 7 steps under a local MAMPP environment on a Mac.

The symfony sandbox is a Symfony project where all the required libraries and some simple controllers are already included and where the basic configuration is already done.

1. Download the sandbox
2. Unpack sandbox in your htdocs folder
3. Check your local server environment with http://localhost:8888/sandbox/web/check.php
4. Check a first webpage in the development environment at http://localhost:8888/sandbox/web/index_dev.php/
5. The sandbox comes with a simple “Hello” app at http://localhost:8888/sandbox/web/index_dev.php/hello/Reinhold%20Weber
6. Explore the web developer toolbar at the bottom (only available in the dev environment under index_dev)
7. Configure a virtual host in conf/apache/httpd.conf which points to the sandbox/web/ directory

Welcome to Symfony2.0, available in late 2010 – enjoy the ride. More on the new Symfony version soon.