ORM Enhancements

A big part of 3.1 was making the ORM even more awesome than it already is.

$articles = $this->Articles->find('popular')->all();

// Later on after some logic has run.
// We can load additional associations.
$withAuthors = $this->Articles->loadInto($articles, ['Authors']);

// Find articles with no comments.
$query = $this->Articles->find('popular')
    ->notMatching('Comments');

$query = $this->Articles->find()
    ->innerJoinWith('Authors')
    ->where(['Authors.promoted' => true]);

Mailers

Mailers allow you to create reusable emails throughout your application. They can also be used to contain multiple email configurations in one location. This helps keep your code DRYer and keeps email configuration noise out of other areas in your application. See the Mailer Documentation for more information.

Additional Template Variables in Templates

You can now add additional template placeholders in your application templates, and then populate those placeholders when generating inputs:

// Add a template with the help placeholder.
$this->Form->templates([
    'inputContainer' => '<div class="input {{type}}{{required}}">
        {{content}} <span class="help">{{help}}</span></div>'
]);

// Generate an input and populate the help variable
echo $this->Form->input('password', [
    'templateVars' => ['help' => 'At least 8 characters long.']
]);

Shell Helpers

Shell Helpers let you easily package up complex output generation code. Shell Helpers can be accessed and used from any shell or task:

// Output some data as a table.
$this->helper('table')->output($data);

// Get a helper from a plugin.
$this->helper('Plugin.HelperName')->output($data);

You can also get instances of helpers and call any public methods on them:

// Get and use the Progress Helper.
$progress = $this->helper('Progress');
$progress->increment(10);
$progress->draw();

CakePHP provides a Progress and Table helper that you can use to make your CLI tools look better.

Important Changes From 3.0

While non of the following changes modified method signatures, the behaviour of specific methods is slightly different than in the past:

• FlashComponent now stacks Flash messages when set with the set() or __call() method. This means that the structure in the Session for stored Flash messages has changed.

• New config storage has been added. It contains the storage class name that AuthComponent uses to store user record. By default SessionStorage is used. If using a stateless authenticator you should configure AuthComponent to use MemoryStorage instead.

• You can now also configure AuthComponent to do the auth check before controller’s beforeFilter() callback is run using the checkAuthIn config. This is particularly useful when using stateless authenticators.

• RequestHandlerComponent now switches the layout and template based on the parsed extension or Accept-Type header in the beforeRender() callback instead of startup().

• The default mime type used when sending requests has changed in HttpClient. Previously multipart/form-data would always be used. In 3.1, multipart/form-data is only used when file uploads are present. When there are no file uploads, application/x-www-form-urlencoded is used instead.

• The following Controller properties are now deprecated:

  • layout
  • view
  • theme
  • autoLayout
  • viewPath
  • layoutPath

  Instead of setting these properties on your controllers, you should set them on the view using methods with the same names.

Other Enhancements

• The default route class has been changed to DashedRoute in the cakephp/app repo. Your current code base is not affected by this, but it is recommended to use this route class from now on.
• The breakpoint() helper function has been added. This function provides a snippet of code that can be put into eval() to trigger an interactive console.
• Shell::dispatchShell() no longer outputs the welcome message from the dispatched shell.
• You can now set _serialized to true for JsonView and XmlView to serialize all view variables instead of explicitly specifying them.
• Time::fromNow() has been added. This method makes it easier to calculate differences from ‘now’.
• Time::i18nFormat() now supports non-gregorian calendars when formatting dates.

Deprecations

As we continue to improve CakePHP, certain features are deprecated as they are replaced with better solutions. Deprecated features will not be removed until 4.0:

• The SessionHelper has been deprecated. You can use $this->request->session() directly.

Unless there are major issues with the 3.1.0-beta release, we will have a release candidate and stable release packaged in the 4-5 weeks. The documentation for 3.1.0 is now available in the book and the API.

As always, a huge thanks to all the community members that helped make this release happen by reporting issues and sending pull requests.

Download a packaged release on github.