The core team is happy to announce the immediate availability of symfony 1.3.0 beta 2. It is available for installation over PEAR or by checkout directly from the Subversion repository. Visit the installation page for all the details.

This is the final beta release of the 1.3 branch, so there aren't too many exciting new features to announce. Our focus has been on improving the stability of the existing code base since the API was locked with the beta 1 release. More information about what's new in symfony 1.3 can be found in the what's new and upgrade tutorials.

Propel 1.4 stable

Integration with Propel 1.4, whose first stable version was just released, has been cleaned up and is now more stable and easier to customize. As Fabian mentioned earlier, the new Propel 1.4 detailed query logging mechanism is now easily configured using symfony's database configuration file.

Response Validation

The response tester, which received a new method for testing the validity of a response in the 1.3 beta 1 release, now supports XSD- and RelaxNG-based validation as well as DTD. What's more, standard DTD definitions are now bundled with symfony, eliminating the cost of external requests when running these validations.

Minor bugs were fixed in the newly-enhanced pager objects, the Propel upgrade task, and the generation of form classes based on Doctrine inheritance models.

What's Next?

We plan to have two release candidate releases before releasing the first stable version of symfony 1.3 at the end of the month. The schedule, subject to change, is as follows:

• 16 November: 1.3.0 RC1
• 23 November: 1.3.0 RC2
• 30 November: 1.3.0 stable

Yep, that's one release a week for the rest of the month. If you haven't done so already, please take a moment to test upgrading an existing symfony 1.2 application to 1.3. The upgrade should go smoothly at this point, but please post any issues you may encounter to Trac. Thank you for helping make this coming release the best it can be!