Router Refactor and Builder Based APIs.

The Router class has been re-factored internally and new methods have been added to allow your routes file to stay DRYer than ever before. In addition to improved methods, the performance of parsing incoming URLs has been greatly improved. Router is stricter about missing routes, and will notify you (via an exception) when a URL cannot be parsed or matched with the connected routes.

The default routes provided by CakePHP have been removed. While helpful in the prototyping stages, these routes created issues with duplicate content and were often not used in larger applications. In their place, a smaller subset of routes is provided to help with the prototype stage of application development. If you have an existing application using 3.0, you will need to update your routes.php file.

CacheHelper Removed

CacheHelper has been removed from CakePHP. The core team feels that the functionality this helper provided is best handled by standalone servers like Varnish. While we explored building a ESI based replacement for CacheHelper, there were a number of edge cases that would have complicated the implementation.

ORM Improvements

• Empty associations in BelongsTo and HasOne associations no longer hydrate an empty entity. Instead the association property will be ` null`.
• Options for all the various ORM operations are now consistent.
• You can specify a white list of fields when marshaling data out of the request and into entities.
• It is now easier to implement custom column types with the ` _initializeSchema` table hook method.
• Query::newExpr() now accepts a SQL expression.
• Conditions with nullable values are easier to build ` ‘fieldIS’=>$val` will generate correct SQL when ` $val` is not ` NULL`.
• Conditions with ` IN` clauses work better with empty data.

Other Changes

• HtmlHelper and FormHelper had their ` $confirmMessage` arguments removed and replaced with ` confirm` options.
• Improved errors for Cells.
• Prefixed controllers can now use prefixed layouts which will be checked automatically.
• Cookies are now read and decrypted lazily.
• The ` ssl` routing option is now ` _ssl`.
• The ` [method]` routing option is now ` _method`.
• Header based route matching has been removed. It was very infrequently used.
• Router::resourceMap() has been removed. New options for Router::mapResources() replace the need to have this method.
• Bcrypt hashing has been removed from ` Security::hash()`

There are still tickets available for CakeFest 2014. You can get your tickets now to join us in Madrid for exciting talks and tutorials on CakePHP and related technologies.

For more details on all the changes in 3.0.0, you can consult the migration guide. I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed thoughts, code, documentation or feedback to 3.0 so far. We are very grateful for all the early adopters and their feedback. Getting issues found and fixed early is a huge help.