CakePHP 3.0.0-beta3 released

The CakePHP core team is excited to announce the release of CakePHP 3.0.0-beta3. While we had originally planned on only doing 2 beta releases, we’re not entirely satisfied with the current ORM validation workflow, and want to do some additional work there. The new plan is to have at least two RC releases after beta3. The RC releases will be API frozen and no new features or breaking changes will be added.

The CakePHP core team is excited to announce the release of CakePHP 3.0.0-beta3. While we had originally planned on only doing 2 beta releases, we’re not entirely satisfied with the current ORM validation workflow, and want to do some additional work there. The new plan is to have at least two RC releases after beta3. The RC releases will be API frozen and no new features or breaking changes will be added.

Since 3.0.0-beta2, we’ve been hard at work incorporating community feedback, and completing the remaining changes that will break compatibility in a significant way.

Breaking Changes since 3.0.0-beta2

• Bake templates now use a templating mechanism that involves a pre- parsing steps of the templates. This was done to improve the readability and ease of creating new bake templates. This also means that any custom templates that you may have will need to be updated.
• The default replacement for Inflector::slug() is now - instead of _.
• LOG_ERROR and TESTS constants were unused and have been removed.
• Controller::$actions was removed and replaced with Controller::isAction(). The new method makes it easier to customize which methods your controllers consider to be routable actions.
• Component::initialize() is now a post-constructor hook like all other initialize methods.
• Component has a new beforeFilter() event listener that is fired before a controllers’ beforeFilter method is.
• CakeSession::read() returns null in all failure scenarios now.
• Controller actions invoked with requestAction() must return a Response object now. All other return values will trigger an error.
• Database configuration no longer accepts the ‘login’ key. You must use ‘username’. This was changed to resolve inconsistencies across the framework.
• Checkbox and radio inputs are now nested inside their attached label elements. This was done to improve compatibility with a few popular CSS libraries. If you have customized the templates FormHelper uses, you may need to update your templates.
• CakeViewErrorMissingViewException is now CakeViewErrorMissingTemplateException in order to allow MissingView to be used for missing view classes.
• Authentication objects that had implemented logout() need to be updated to use the new Auth.logout event.
• The App.www_root configuration value has been renamed to App.wwwRoot for consistency reasons.

New features since 3.0.0-beta2

• CakeCacheEngineFileEngine now generates directories when debug is off.
• There are several new standalone libraries extracted from CakePHP. The Cache, Log, Utility packages are now installable separately with composer.
• The pj() (print json) helper method has been added as a convenience when working in the interactive console or test cases.
• The Model.initialize event has been added. This event is fired right after a table’s initialize hook has completed, allowing plugins or other listeners to interact with table objects.
• Database connections, cache engines, loggers and email transports can now be configured with a Datasource Name (DSN) using the url key. This makes it easier to define configuration in environment variables which is a recommended approach by many Platform as a service providers.
• Component::initialize() and View::initialize() were added.
• Arbitrary meta tags can be created with HtmlHelper::meta().
• Exceptions are now raised when custom view class cannot be found.
• Request data marshaled into entities is not forcibly cast now. This makes validating entity data a bit easier as entity data more closely represents the original request data.
• The query expression builder now has a between() method for generating BETWEEN clauses.
• CakeORMBehavior::initialize() was added.
• Stack traces are now displayed on fatal errors if xdebug is installed.
• Request::is() now caches results in memory.
• AuthComponent has two new events. Auth.afterIdentify is fired after a user is identified or logged in. Auth.logout is fired when AuthComponent::logout() is called.
• SessionComponent is deprecated. Instead you should be using $this->request->session() instead.
• Each hasher in the FallbackHasher class can have separate options now.

For more details on all the changes in 3.0.0, you can consult the migration guide. In closing, we’d like to thank all of the people that have helped so far with the 3.0 release. We’ve made great progress and without your help we wouldn’t be here today.

Download a packaged release.