A form now always has to be bound, independent of whether the request is a POST request or not. The bind() method detects itself whether the request was a post request or not and reads its data accordingly. The "old" bind()/isBound() methods were renamed to submit()/isSubmitted().
$form = new Form('author');
$form->bind($request, $author);
if ($form->isValid()) {
// isValid() implies isSubmitted(), non-submitted forms can
// never be valid
// do something with author now
}
Alternatively, you can only bind global variables, if you don't have a request object.
$form->bindGlobals($author);
Note that the $author object is in both cases optional. You can also pass no object at all and read the data using $form->getData(), but then no validation will occur. You can also prefill the form with an object during instantiation.
$form = new Form('author', array('data' => $author));
$form->bind($request);
// etc.
Internally, ChoiceField expects both choices and preferred_choices to be a simple array, so I replaced incomplete bits of code that attempted to not modify a possible ArrayObject and instead added type checks in the configure() method (with unit tests for expected exceptions).