Deprecations

• The action option in FormHelper::create() has been deprecated, as it was in 3.x. Note that this now makes the action key of an array URL consistently respected for the generation of the DOM ID. If you used the deprecated key you will want to compare the generated ID for the forms before and after your upgrade.

PHP7 Compatibility

CakePHP 2.8 is compatible with, and tested against PHP7.

New Features

• When handling fatal errors, CakePHP will now adjust the memory limit by 4MB to ensure that the error can be logged correctly. You can disable this behavior by setting Error.extraFatalErrorMemory to 0 in your Config/core.php.
• Cache::add() has been added. This method lets you add data to a cache if the key did not already exist. This method will work atomically in Memcached, Memcache, APC and Redis. Other cache backends will do non-atomic operations.
• CakeTime::listTimezones() has been changed to accept array in the last argument. Valid values for the $options argument are: group, abbr, before, and after.
• A new option no-locations has been added to Console/cake i18n. When enabled, this option will disable the generation of location references in your POT files.
• Hash::sort() now supports case-insensitive sorting via the ignoreCase option.
• Magic finders now support custom finder types. For example if your model implements a find('published') finder, you can now use findPublishedBy and findPublishedByAuthorId functions through the magic method interface.