It’s not flawless, but so far, for my purposes, it beats or equals the other web frameworks I’ve tried out, except possibly web2py, which I’m just starting to get to grips with. I won’t go into much detail here (I’m busy!) but here are symfony’s most noteworthy pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

• Uses latest major release of PHP, meaning it should be deployable with just about any hosting service.
• End-to-end documentation (from download to deployment), with additional tutorials for newbies.
• Fairly comprehensive API.
• Mature enough to have addressed all the normal requirements: authentication, caching, admin generation, etc.
• Last but certainly not least: a forum and IRC channel full of very helpful people who respond quickly.

Cons:

• Uses PHP, so some of the syntax is less easy to read than Python or Ruby code would be (PHP’s a double-edged sword; see the “pro” above).
• A handful of parts of the documentation aren’t up-to-date, notably in the Askeet tutorial (the documentation is still more comprehensive and up-to-date than that of most recent open-source web frameworks, however).
• The sync script for deployment behaves weirdly on Vista (though this can be overcome by using cygwin – more on how to do this here).