This release is not without it's major changes, but thankfully this should be the last of those. The two most significant changes come in the usage of conditions and the deprecation of several methods.

Query conditions have always been a concern of ours, for the obvious reason of helping developers maintain secure applications. We found that in some cases, it was possible to work around what Cake expects to produce undesirable results. To help ensure that applications are secure with no extra effort on the part of the developer, we have moved all operators used in conditions to the "key" side. For example, $conditions = array('Model.field >' => $value); is the new syntax. We have maintained backwards compatibility for the most common cases, you will need to update your affected application code.

Deprecation is something we do our best to avoid, but sometimes in the interest of a simple, pure API we make the move to remove some of those old methods that have given way to simpler code. View::renderElement() is one such method that has given way to View::element(); You will not see a notice in this release, however, the next release will throw a notice and in the subsequent release the method will be removed completely. Speaking of removed methods, any deprecated code that existed prior to this release is now gone. There are a few other methods, mainly some more of those found in basics that have been deprecated. Check out the changelog[2] and have a look at the API[3] to see where these changes were made.

We also have exciting new enhancements in this release of Cake 1.2. We already alluded to the code coverage analysis. Code coverage is helping to ensure that we test as many lines of code as possible. If you have XDebug installed, you can take advantage of this nice feature. Another highly desirable feature has been additional support for more advanced queries. To help in this area we added the ContainableBehavior. The behavior is a optimized combination of the code used by Felix (in his behavior by the same name) and Mariano (in the BindableBehavior). If you were using either of these two behaviors before you may notice some slight changes to syntax, but overall the functionality makes for very powerful find operations. Several other more minor enhancements trickled their way into the core, and we will leave you to peruse the changelog[2] for those.

With all of these improvements and updates, being a CakePHP developer and building new projects on CakePHP is better than ever. To help out the project and everyone in the community, we have partnered with EliteOpenSourceJobs.com. EliteOpenSourceJobs.com is a start-up that aims to help open source communities raise funds through hosting their own job boards. They make it simple and painless for communities like ours to provide a service for developers and employers to create new applications and technology together. Check out the CakePHP job board at http://cakephp.org/jobs. Posting to the job board carries a fee, but we do that to ensure that the post is legitimate and to help the continued growth of CakePHP.

We have also begun using Ohloh Journals to let the everyone know what is going on. You can see the feed of CakePHP team members on the CakePHP.org homepage and Planet. Ohloh is great resource that helps us keep track of the project. Check it out and follow us on the journals[3].

Overall, more than 800 revisions have produced this release. We must thank everyone who contributed to the effort by writing tests, creating patches, and committing code. We hope you all enjoy the release and look forward to a quick release candidate cycle.

Bake on.

[1] http://cakeforge.org/projects/cakephp/ [2] http://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/changelog/1.2.x.x [3] http://api.cakephp.org/1.2/deprecated.html [4] http://ohloh.net/projects/cakephp/messages