CakePHP 5.3.0-RC1 Released

The CakePHP core team is happy to announce the first release candidate for CakePHP 5.3.0. The 5.3 release includes several behavior changes to increase correctness and new features. The highlights of those include:

• Minium PHP version requirement is now PHP 8.2.0.
• The Redis cache engine now supports Redis clusters.
• cake plugin assets symlink command now supports a --relative option to create relative path symlinks.
• cake server now supports a --frankenphp option that will start the development server with FrankenPHP.
• Added Configure attribute to support injecting Configure values into constructor arguments.
• Added Query::optimizerHint() which accepts engine-specific optimizer hints.
• Added additional database types for year, inet, cidr, and macaddr.
• Added Date::getTimestamp(). This method returns an int of the date’s timestamp.
• Table::patchEntity(), Table::newEntity(), Marshaller::one() and Marshaller::many() now accept a strictFields option that only applies validation to the fields listed in the fields option.
• Added TableContainer that you can register in your Application::services() to add dependency injection for your Tables.
• Added SortableFieldsBuilder class enabling fluent configuration of sortable fields with advanced features. The sortableFields option now accepts a callable that receives a SortableFieldsBuilder instance, allowing you to map friendly sort keys to database fields with multi-column sorting and direction control.
• assertRedirectBack() and assertRedirectBackToReferer() were added to improve ergonomics of asserting redirects.
• HtmlHelper::scriptStart() and scriptEnd() now allow simple wrapping script tags (<script>...</script>) around inline JavaScript. This enables syntax highlighting in many editors.
• StringTemplate::addClassNames() was added to provide a more ergonomic way to generate class names.
• Cake\Http\Middleware\RateLimiterMiddleware was added to provide rate limiting functionality for applications.