Richard Miller has a new post to his blog today that recommends moving away from the base controller the Symfony introductory documentation has you make. He suggests an alternative that can be used more widely.

In fact, it is the advised best practice for controllers in shared bundles. When you do, you will no longer have access to these useful methods, in this post I am going to look at how to accomplish the same tasks without them. I have created a simple controller for some basic form interaction with a model which uses the base controllers methods. I am going to go through how to change this to a service which does not extend the base controller.

He starts with his "TestimonialController" that does some of the basic CRUD operations on the testimonial information. He shows you, step-by-step, the refactoring needed to stop using things like the default controller helpers (each with replacement code). With those removed, he can move to extend "ContainerAware" instead of "Controller", make the controller a service and doing some dependency injection for needed resources.