Eventually, you will need to alter symfony's behavior. Whether you need to modify the way a certain class behaves or add your own custom features, the moment will inevitably happen--all clients have specific requirements that no framework can forecast. As a matter of fact, this situation is so common that symfony provides a mechanism to extend existing classes, called a mixin. You can even replace the core symfony classes on your own, using the factories settings. Once you have built an extension, you can easily package it as a plug-in, so that it can be reused in other applications--or by other symfony users.