CakePHP 3.0.0-dev3 released
Fresh slices of the new development preview for version 3.0 are hot and out of the oven!
The CakePHP core team proudly announces the third development preview of CakePHP 3.0.0. In the couple months between 3.0.0-dev2 and this release, we’ve been working really hard at getting the remaining big parts of the new features we wanted to introduce into the framework.
We have decided to not do a future 3.0.0-dev4 release as everything that was planned for it was already completed. This means that the next release will be ‘alpha’ and the team will focus mostly on polishing the current features, documentation and porting some of the 2.x plugins. We’re really happy with the progress we have made and the pace at which 3.0 is going.
Additionally the team has spent plenty of time incorporating all the community feedback into the new ORM and we’re humbled by the amount of people putting some of their time into making it even more comprehensive and easy to use.
This release also comes with full documentation for the new features and changes, make sure you check out the new CakePHP 3.0 book To read about them in detail.
Below the list of new features and changes that made it into 3.0.0-dev3:
Console improvements
- New ConsoleIO class added. It is a convenience class containing common method for input/output in shells.
- Console methods will receive passed arguments as function parameters, much like controller actions.
- Adding subcommands for Tasks is now required.
- Possibility to alias any shell command, for example instead of ` Console/cakebakemodel` you could do ` Console/cakebmodel`.
View Cells
View cells are small classes that offer controller-like functionality but can be used directly in the view to pull data from any source and render certain template. Read more about View Cells
New Time Library
The Time class was completely re-implemented to internally use Carbon. Whatever the Carbon library and ` DateTime` can do, the new Time lib can too. This means that the method in ` Time` are no longer static, you need and instance of the object to get access to its methods.
In addition to the new Time class being added, it has been integrated with the ORM, meaning that any timestamp/datetime columns in your entities will be able to leverage the power CakeUtilityTime provides.
Lastly, the Time lib uses the ` intl` php extension to provide reliable locale-aware date formatting which is several times superior to the support that we could offer in the 2.x series.
Bake
Bake is finally working again in CakePHP 3.0, but it also brings a nice number of great new features:
- Bake is now pluggable! You can create your own bake tasks and they will be automatically discovered. This means that you can now implement your own ` Console/cakebakesuper_table`
- Ability to bake shells, cells, components, behaviors and more
Additionally we added some other changes:
- Microsoft SQL Server support was added to the new ORM
- TreeBehavior was re-implemented and offers feature parity with its previous version form 2.x
- Both Behaviors and Components have now a ` config()` method, configuration using public properties was removed
- Multiple bugfixes in the ORM
- ` Collection::nest()` and ` Collection::listNested()` were added for dealing with hirarchical data
- ` Validator::notEmpty()` was added as a complement to ` Validator::allowEmpty()`
- Moved exception files to their corresponding namespaces
- Simplified View objects construction, they are not dependent on controllers anymore
- ` Request::isMobile` now uses an external library to correctly match the ever-growing number of mobile devices
Community plugins
Some have been also very busy catching up with the changes introduced daily in the 3.0 branch. We’d like to mention the CRUD plugin which contains a dynamic scaffolding and automatic Admin generator. It may be a great way of getting on into CakePHP 3.0 the fast way.
Dereuromark’s Tools plugin seems to be having some interesting activity with some good behaviors ready to use in CakePHP 3.0.
Up next
Our next release will be marked as alpha and we are going to focus on the following:
- Make the session object live inside the Request object. It will not be static anymore
- Implementing the new middleware layer
- Themes implemented as plugins
- CookieComponent reworked.
- Overhaul i18n to use intl and add support for i18n engines
We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed thoughts, code, documentation or feedback to 3.0 so far. It looks like it is going to be the single most important and feature rich release when it is marked stable!