Authorization

AuthComponent received some love, it is now much easier to implement stateless authorization mechanisms that will respond with appropriate error codes instead of redirecting on missing access rights. The new ` AuthComponent::$unauthorizedRedirect` property was added to control this behavior at runtime and it can be set to false or to an URL as needed.

For improved security, we have added a new Blowfish adapter that will hash your passwords using blowfish/bcrypt.

Additionally, we have deprecated ` AuthComponent::redirect()` in favor of ` AuthComponent::redirectUrl` to better reflect what the method is doing.

Paginator

If you want to use a custom find method in your pagination calls, it is now easier. Just set the ` findType` key in the Paginator settings array and profit!

We have also decided to return a NotFoundException error in case any user tries to access a page of out range instead of serving an inexistent one or the first, which was the previous behavior.

Now setting the ‘limit’ manually in the Paginator settings array to a value bigger than maxLimit will actually bring maxLimit to the same value, no need to repeat yourself.

Custom view classes

Don’t like the built-in implementation for content type views? Need to extend them somehow? That is easier than ever! Just set the view class name using ` RequestHandlerComponent::viewClassMap()` or set the map directly in the settings array for the RequestHandlerComponent.

We <3 PHP 5.4

Yeah, we still support 5.2. But, it did not prevent us from releasing a cool shell command for creating an standalone php server for quick development. Just start it with ` Console/cakeserver`

Configuring your app

Configuration engines are now capable of storing their internal state to the format they understand. ` ConfigReaderInterface::dump()` was added and the correspondent implementation for the IniReader engine. This is useful if you need to persist dynamically generated configuration or if you want to implement a custom configuration engine that stores in a database.

A common complaint about CakePlugin::loadAll() was that it did not check whether the bootstrap files in plugins actually existed or not. This made it difficult for applications like a CMS to load all extensions in one go. While we still believe each plugin should be loaded with the correct settings, we have added a new ` ignoreMissing` key in the plugin configuration array. ` CakePlugin::loadAll(array(‘ro utes’=>true,’bootstrap’=>true,’ignoreMissing’=>true))` will load all plugins and not yell at you if one of the routes.php or bootstrap.php files is missing.

Networking and email

Just as you can read the posted data using dot notation with ` request->data(‘key’)`, you can now do the same with the querystring, by using the method ` request->query(‘key’)`

After some thought, we decided to deprecate MediaView. All its code lives now in CakeResponse::file(), this makes it a one-liner to send files directly to the browser either by streaming it or making it an download.

We added support for TLS connections in CakeSocket, this made it possible to send emails over SMTP + TLS protocols. Also, it is now possible to set the Content-Disposition header for attachments sent with CakeEmail by using the ` contentDisposition` option

As a minor, but important change, HttpResponse was deprecated and all its code resides in the new class HttpSocketResponse.

Views and helpers

The view class received some love once again, continuing our efforts since 2.1. One of the changes is to make ` View::fetch()` have a default text in case the requested block is empty. Also, ` View::prepend` handy method was added to prepend text to any existing block. In case you were interested in executing some code only if a block already existed, then the new ` View::startIfEmpty()` might be what you were looking for.

If you had a case where you could not know in advance whether an element file existed or not, 2.3 is now for you. We have introduced ` View::elementExists()` and added the ` ignoreMissing` option to ` View::element()` to suppress the missing element errors.

Another simple yet important change: our default layout uses HTML5 as doctype. We did this because now FormHelper will add the ` required` attribute to your fields.

FormHelper got even more intelligent, it can now select the correct input type for telephone and email fields. Also, it is now possible to to use any HTTP verb in ` FormHelper::postLink()`

PaginatorHelper got a few new and very much anticipated features:

• ` PaginatorHelper::numbers()` now has a new option currentTag to allow specifying extra tag for wrapping current page number.
• For ` PaginatorHelper::prev()` and ` PaginatorHelper::next()` it is now possible to set the tag option to false to disable the wrapper. Also a new option disabledTag has been added for these two methods.

Finally, helpers got a $settings property, that will be set with any array specified from the controller.

Caching

• File Engine is now the default caching engine, this solves quite a few problems with people not having APC installed or forgetting to change the cache prefix when having multiple apps on the same server
• It is finally possible to have different full page caches, for example a different cache per subdomain. This is achieved with the new viewPrefix setting in the cache configuration. ` Configure::write(‘Cache.viewPrefix’,‘YOURPREFIX’);`

Models

IMPORTANT: ` Model::find(‘first’)` will now return an empty array when no records are found. Make sure you update your tests!

• Added support for bigint data types and MySQL FULLTEXT indexes.
• ` Validation::fileSize()` was added.

When testing models, or controllers, you can now use ` CakeTestCase::getMockForModel()` for quickly generating model mocks that will have the correct alias, table name and be correctly registered in the ClassRegistry.