Mirroring the move they made previously to move the Yahoo! Bookmarks service over to Symfony, the company has updating their Yahoo! Answers service to be the same. According to the symfony blog today:

Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

The post shares some of the thoughts behind the move including their philosophy, the design of the project and a link to a presentation given on the update.

The Symfony project is recommending you upgrade your plugins to the latest editions - an issue with the PEAR channel caused it to load the wrong ones:

A problem in the symfony project PEAR channel made the plugin-install task always install the oldest version of the plugins, instead of the latest. If you recently installed plugins with the symfony command line, you probably installed an outdated version. Plugins installed via SVN are not affected.

You'll need to run a plugin-upgrade command for each of the plugins installed on your system to ensure that you're completely up to date. The post has complete info on how to tell which plugins you have and the exact commands to issue to being them up to date.

Pierre-Alain Joye has posted an example of one way to use the XDebug software - to debug the symfony framework or any other script (with the help of vim).

Xdebug is one of the best debugger and profiler for php (maybe the only good one in open source :). The only problem is its lack of dedicated client. The only problem is its lack of dedicated client, however there is many plugins for many IDE or editors like Eclipse PDT or weaverslave and even for my favourite editor, Vim.

He quickyl runs through the installation of XDebug in your installation and the script needed to set up the debugging in vim. All that's left is to add the "XDEBUG_SESSION_START=1" flag to the end of your script name and letting the information flow in.

Dave Dash has posted a configuration that he had shared with him for getting nginx and the symfony framework to work happily together.

I almost gave up on nginx and was going to settle on lighttpd or Apache, but I decided to check the symfony list and in minutes Kiril Angov (Kupokomapa) answered with a working nginx configuration. This is why I like the symfony community.

He includes the config in an easy to use/c&p kind of format so you can drop it into your install and get it up and running quick.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode #32 of their popular PHP podcast series (PHP Abstract) - "Introduction to symfony" as hosted by Stefan Koopmanschap.

Today's special guest is Stefan Koopmanschap. Stefan is web application developer and professional services consultant for Ibuildings.nl. He is the initiator of the SymfonyCamp event in 2007, and is also trying to promote symfony in The Netherlands with his local website symfony-framework.nl. His own website can be found at www.leftontheweb.com

You know the drill - there's three ways to get this latest and greatest show:

• listen on the web via the embeded player
• Download the mp3 for immediate satisfaction
• Subscribe to their feed in your aggregator of choice

On his blog, Karl Katzke has posted his own comparison of two of the popular PHP frameworks available for developers - Symfony and the Zend Framework.

The Symfony and Zend frameworks are so amazingly different that they almost don't deserve to share the title "framework." [...] Both frameworks are PHP5-native frameworks and won't function in PHP4. Both are heavily object-oriented and make use of inheritance that's only offered in PHP>5. Both use the front controller model. The similarities end there.

He compares them on a few levels:

• Getting Started
• Unit Testing
• Templating
• Plugins
• Database Modules

Be sure to check out his conclusion for his personal choice - we won't spoil it here.