Create a canonical article about Composer

[nicwortel]

As discussed here, the idea is to write a canonical article about Composer: what it is, how to install it (local and/or globally), and how to use it. It shouldn't be a complete copy of Composer's own documentation, but should serve as an introduction to Composer for people who never used it before.

This article could be linked to by other articles, such as Installing and Configuring Symfony and How to Create and store a Symfony2 Project in Git (there might be more, I didn't search for other articles mentioning Composer very thoroughly).

This way, other articles only have to cover the basics, and can link to the canonical Composer-article for more information about Composer.

[javiereguiluz]

👍 I think it's very important to have a reference page about Composer installation. For example, in the new Symfony Download page, we'll show a bit of information about Composer and we could link to this article. Here it is the relevant part of this new page:

[wouterj]

I'm -1 for such an article. The Symfony docs should explain you Symfony only (with some little side steps to third party libraries). If people want to install Composer or want to learn more about composer, people should read blog articles and Composer's documentation. We can't serve as a complete guide to PHP tooling :)

[stof]

IMO, it would be much better to link to the Composer doc itself to explain composer.
then, if you think that some parts of the composer documentation are not well explained, it is better to contribute to the composer doc than to create your own documentation about composer IMO

[javiereguiluz]

@wouterj @stof if the idea was to rewrite the Composer manual, I'm obviously against it.

But given that installing and configuring Composer correctly is absolutely mandatory to use Symfony2 without problems, I think it's really important to write a short article about Composer aimed for Symfony2 developers.

[wouterj]

Aren't we going to copy http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/installation.html then?

[weaverryan]

We probably need something, but I don't know exactly where/what. This will be especially true after we get the new download page - @javiereguiluz it looks great, can we get it now??? ;)

We need to look at each step in the process of downloading and starting with Symfony. For example:

1. I go to symfony.com
2. I click download
3. I see a link to download composer
4. I run that command
5. it asks me questions
6. etc etc etc

Our goal should be to have the highest conversion rate (to use an analytics term) from each step to the next. Of course we can't measure this, but you get the idea. If there's a detail missing somewhere, let's add it. Personally, I think we have details all of the place right now - we have the download page, the installation page on the docs, the quick tour page, the README on the standard edition, etc. That's too much - there are too many paths :).

I think we should move on this aggressively, and I'll have some more ideas/details soon. But overall, as long as we're motivating any change by directly improving the "experience" of a new developer through this process, then we're doing the right thing.

Thanks!