The Bakery Everything CakePHP

For this year, we would like to share CakePHP 1.2 Beta. We can honestly and unequivocally say this is our best release ever. The number of new features alone make Cake a joy to use, but given the process of development we have allowed these features to mature, finding the proper balance between usability and extensibility. Sure, many things have changed from the 1.1 days, but a lot of that old code should still work just fine. Where we could add, we did so with caution and care. Where we needed to rip apart, we sliced and diced to find elegant solutions. The end result is a feature-rich development framework without too many significant changes. Most changes require a simple find and replace with clear error messages to get you to the right place.

Some of the new features in 1.2 may seem old to people. Those in the community who have not had a chance to try out Cake 1.2 will be happy to see some of these features being supported by the core.

Router improvements including reverse routing for array based urls, parseExtensions for handling multiple content types, mapResources for handling RESTful automagic, and named arguments with a default format of "name:value".

Forms are easier to create and maintain. Including the handling of multiple records and complex data structures. Automagic REST handling and unique handling of GET and POST types. Forms "know" your model and you should thank them for it.

Security enhancements for better CSRF prevention and HTTP Authentication.

EmailComponent handles html and text messages via templates, layouts or on its own. It may not look like the most full featured component, but when it can handle attachments, html, and text there should to be too much left wanting.

CookieComponent for securely storing persistent data on the client side

Behaviors allow the model functionality to be extended and encapsulated by providing a simple and reusable interface. Tree and Acl included for your enjoyment.

The "with" key allows you to define a dynamic join table model and access it as your would any other model

Validation has been greatly extended to include the majority of common validation methods

Pagination of model records with an extensive helper for neatly displaying access to multiple pages and sorting the records

Internationalization and Localization with static translations in gettext style or dynamic translations of model data.

Authentication component to validate user accounts tied to Access Control made easier through the behavior to handle user permissions.

Configure class to provide dynamic handling of configuration settings and App class to handle importing required classes

Cache Engines to provide an interface to memcache, xcache, apc, the file system or database to help speed up your application and provide access to persistent data.

Console is a complete mini framework for creating command line interfaces for your application and development environment. The new console provides an extensible shell and task system. To setup the new console, see the screencasts http://cakephp.org/screencasts Bake has been greatly improved with the ability to have custom templates for views as well as directly access specific code generation tasks. An interactive console allows you to run code before your write it. The API shell gives you access to documentation without digging through the code. Schema provides a versioning and distribution interface for your database structure. ACL allows you to CRUD your permissions and grant/deny/inherit access. The extractor makes creating static translation files easier and faster by pulling strings from your code.

A lot of new stuff and not a whole lot of documentation on it just yet. This is also improving as the docs team is hard at work on http://tempdocs.cakephp.org. We need your help as always, so if you can spare some extra time talk to _psychic_ or gwoo in IRC.

When you head over to http://cakephp.org you should see something new and exciting to go along with the beta release. Once again, a special thanks to Armando Sosa for providing the graphics and layout. Several new features and some old ones that received a complete rewrite for 1.2.

So, out with the old and in with new. May 2008 be more exciting and successful for everyone.
We have a lot planned, including something with a 2, a dot, and a 0.

Happy Baking,

Beta: 1.2.0.6311 http://cakeforge.org/frs/?group_id=23&release_id=372 1.2.0.6311 Change log: https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/changelog/1.2.x.x
Stable: 1.1.19.6305 http://cakeforge.org/frs/?group_id=23&release_id=371 1.1.19.6305 Change log: https://trac.cakephp.org/wiki/changelog/1.1.x.x