On the Liip blog they've taken a look back at the impact that the Symfony project (and related projects) have had on the PHP community and ecosystem.

As we were preparing the news about becoming a [Sensiolabs Silver Partner](https://www.liip.ch/en/news/archive/2015/10/15/liip-now-a-sensiolabs-silver-partner.html), I brought back a bit to the history of Symfony here at Liip. We did do a few symfony v1 projects at Liip but things only really took off with Symfony2. Back in 2009 Fabien came to Zurich to discuss some of the Symfony2 components (still PHP 5.2 compatible at the time) he had just released as well as a few he hadn’t yet released. Jordi, who was working at Liip at the time, and I integrated all of them into our company internal framework over the following months which we later presented at the Symfony Live. This means Liip in fact build the [first Symfony2 framework](http://www.slideshare.net/lsmith77/okapi-meet-symfony-symfony-meet-okapi), even before there was the official Symfony framework.

He goes on to talk about the early days of the Symfony community and the work that was done on several bundles outside of the framework itself. He touches on the Symfony ecosystem and its growth during this time and the influence it has had on the PHP community.

All and all I believe that Symfony has really commoditized the concept of a framework for PHP applications. Reusing an existing framework is now the standard when building new PHP applications. Any project that wants to stay alive will in the long run have to refactor on top of a framework.