DebugKit

Debugging CakePHP 3.0 applications is even better. The new DebugKit is easier to install, faster and looks gorgeous.

DebugKit is a application toolbar that collects useful statistics about your code such as time and memory, executed queries, log messages and view variables. To install Debugkit just use

 `
composerrequirecakephp/debug_kit"3.0.*-dev"

`

And add this line to your bootstrap.php file:

Plugin::load('DebugKit', ['bootstrap' => true]);

If you install a new application using the app skeleton, DebugKit will be automatically installed for you.

Database Migrations

Migrations is now an official CakePHP plugin. It wraps the excellent Phinx library into a CakePHP shell to avoid repeating configuration strings and add some of the cake experience. A database migration generated by this plugin would look like:

<?php
use Phinx\Migration\AbstractMigration;
class CreateUsersTable extends AbstractMigration {
    /**
     * Change.
     */
    public function change() {
        // create the table
        $table = $this->table('users');
        $table->addColumn('id', 'integer')
            ->addColumn('username', 'string')
            ->addColumn('password', 'string')
            ->addColumn('created', 'datetime')
            ->create();
    }

Migrations are reversible. This means that with the same code you can create or rollback the changes done to the database schema.

To install the Migrations plugins run:

 `
composerrequirecakephp/migrations"dev-master"

`

And add this line to your bootstrap.php file:

Plugin::load('Migrations');

New Logger interface

CakePHP has adopted the PSR-3 recommendation for loggers. Now all log engines implement the ` PrsLogLoggerInterface`interface. This means that the entire logging system can easily be replaced by other implementations, such as the popular Monolog library.

Integration Tests and Data Integrity

Testing controllers has always been problematic. While ControllerTestCase solved some of the problems, we identified this class as a source of problems and confusion among our users. We decided to implement the new IntegrationTestCase class as a way totest all aspects of an HTTP request in your application without much mocking being involved. This should help you improve code quality and ensure that your application and routes are working as expected.

We also made the fixtures system better, allowing developers to define and work with foreign key constraints in their database. The fixtures system will now correctly load all data and enable constraints right before your test code is executed.

Separate packages

We’ve seen an increasing interest in using the new ORM outside the framework or within older CakePHP applications. One of our goals since the start has been making this possible. We have already begun the work to split the framework into various standalone components that can be reused and installed with composer. While the ORM has not yet been extracted into its own repository, most of the necessary pre- requisites are complete. As a product of this work, we have already extracted several components out of the main code base:

• Collections: Provides a set of tools to manipulate arrays or Traversable objects in an efficient and elegant way.
• Validation: The excellent and flexible validation library can now be used in any project!
• Utility: Provides the Hash, Inflector, String and Xml classes.
• Event: Our Signal-Slot (or Observer Pattern) implementation.
• Core: The CakePHP core, containing the Configuration and Plugin management classes.

It is important to note that the these repositories are read-only, development will continue in the main CakePHP repository and code will be synchronized regularly to these splits. Please open any ticket or pull request directly in the main github repository.

ORM Related Improvements

• Added Query::autoFields(). This controls whether the fields for the main table are automatically selected.
• Ability to pass finder options to custom finders from the paginator by using the finderOptions key.
• It is now possible to get the default column values out of the database using the SchemaTable::defaultValue().
• Added accessibleFields as an option key for newEntity() and patchEntity(). This will allow finer grain control for mass- assignment.
• TranslateBehavior automatically finds translations based on the current application locale.
• Table::findOrCreate() was added.
• Ability to override the join type for an association using contain()

Plugin Shells

Shells in plugins can now be called without prefixing with the plugin name. For example for a do_stuff shell living in the Tools plugin, you can execute:

 `
bin/cakedo_stuff

`

Other improvements

• New uploadedFile validation rule.
• Made String::uuid() 3 times faster.
• Better exception reporting on fatal errors.
• Inflector was optimized for better performance.
• Several optimizations in the Hash class.
• Added Collection::buffered() to transform non-rewindable iterators in rewindable ones.

Community Plugins

More plugins for version 3.0 are starting to pop. Here’s a list of what we found interesting:

• TwigView Use Twig as the default templating engine.
• Imagine Image manipulation plugin
• Geo Contains utility libraries and behaviors for working with geo data.
• Blame Records the user id who modified a row in the database.
• CakePdf Generates PDF files using different engines
• Authenticate Authorization and Authentication adapters
• TinyAuth A lightweight authorization system.
• TwitterBootstrap A plugin to generate Boostraped interfaces
• Whoops Replaces the default exception renderer with a nice debugging interface.
• Assetic Minifies and pre-processes CSS and Javascript We’d like to thank again everyone who has contributed thoughts, code, documentation or feedback to 3.0 so far.

Download the release

You can grab the packaged release here: cakephp-3-0-0-beta2.zip