For those not familiar with the Symfony PHP framework, all of the hype surrounding its version 2 release might seem a little too much. Wojciech Sznapka has a new post that tells you why it's such a "big deal" and what you could expect from it.

On July 28th Symfony2 was finally released, with launch parties all over the world. Developers are excited, managers are excited and whole ecosystem is happy. They're right, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. symfony 1.x is a great framework, I made many projects with it, nevertheless Symfony2 is a new way of doing things in PHP. I observe, that applications made with symfony 1 tends to be messy with raising number of functionalities. There too many magic tricks, which you can use, which are hard to manage in big, multi-team projects. Symfony2 does it smarter.

He lists a few things that are larger changes in Symfony2 including a cleaner templating system for views (Twig), a focus on reusability, the bundling of Doctrine2 for ORM/database support and other updates like namespace support, PHPUnit compatibility and code generators.

You can find out more about the project (and how you can contribute) on the framework's website.