PHP: CakePHP 2.3.0 is out!

The CakePHP core team is proud to announce the immediate availability of CakePHP 2.3.0 and 2.2.6[1]. There have been a few small improvements and fixes since the release of 2.3.0-RC2.

CakePHP 2.3 is now marked as stable

2.3.0 is a new version that is completely compatible with its 2.2.5 predecessor. If you get excited to upgrade your projects right away after reading this announcement, make sure you read the migration guide in the book[2], as there are a few changes that your application might require

This is a quick review of the changes that made it in this new iteration.

Authorization

AuthComponent received some love, it is now much easier to implement stateless authorization mechanisms that will respond with appropriate error codes instead of redirecting on missing access rights. The new AuthComponent::$unauthorizedRedirectproperty was added to control this behavior at runtime and it can be set to false or to an URL as needed.

For improved security, we have added a new Blowfish adapter that will hash your passwords using blowfish/bcrypt.

Additionally, we have deprecated AuthComponent::redirect() in favor of AuthComponent::redirectUrl to better reflect what the method is doing.

Paginator

If you want to use a custom find method in your pagination calls, it is now easier. Just set the findType key in the Paginator settings array and profit!

We have also decided to return a NotFoundException error in case any user tries to access a page of out range instead of serving an inexistent one or the first, which was the previous behavior.

Now setting the 'limit' manually in the Paginator settings array to a value bigger than maxLimit will actually bring maxLimit to the same value, no need to repeat yourself.

Custom view classes

Don't like the built-in implementation for content type views? Need to extend them somehow? That is easier than ever! Just set the view class name using RequestHandlerComponent::viewClassMap() or set the map directly in the settings array for the RequestHandlerComponent.

We <3 PHP 5.4

Yeah, we still support 5.2. But, it did not prevent us from releasing a cool shell command for creating an standalone php server for quick development. Just start it with Console/cake server

Configuring your app

Configuration engines are now capable of storing their internal state to the format they understand.ConfigReaderInterface::dump() was added and the correspondent implementation for the IniReader engine. This is useful if you need to persist dynamically generated configuration or if you want to implement a custom configuration engine that stores in a database.

A common complaint about CakePlugin::loadAll() was that it did not check whether the bootstrap files in plugins actually existed or not. This made it difficult for applications like a CMS to load all extensions in one go. While we still believe each plugin should be loaded with the correct settings, we have added a new ignoreMissing key in the plugin configuration array.CakePlugin::loadAll(array('routes' => true, 'bootstrap' => true, 'ignoreMissing' => true)) will load all plugins and not yell at you if one of the routes.php or bootstrap.php files is missing.

Networking and email

Just as you can read the posted data using dot notation with request->data('key') , you can now do the same with the querystring, by using the method request->query('key')

After some thought, we decided to deprecate MediaView. All its code lives now in CakeResponse::file(), this makes it a one-liner to send files directly to the browser either by streaming it or making it an download.

We added support for TLS connections in CakeSocket, this made it possible to send emails over SMTP + TLS protocols. Also, it is now possible to set the Content-Disposition header for attachments sent with CakeEmail by using the contentDispositionoption

As a minor, but important change, HttpResponse was deprecated and all its code resides in the new class HttpSocketResponse.

Views and helpers

The view class received some love once again, continuing our efforts since 2.1. One of the changes is to make View::fetch()have a default text in case the requested block is empty. Also, View::prepend handy method was added to prepend text to any existing block. In case you were interested in executing some code only if a block already existed, then the newView::startIfEmpty() might be what you were looking for.

If you had a case where you could not know in advance whether an element file existed or not, 2.3 is now for you. We have introduced View::elementExists() and added the ignoreMissing option to View::element() to suppress the missing element errors.

Another simple yet important change: our default layout uses HTML5 as doctype. We did this because now FormHelper will add the required attribute to your fields.

FormHelper got even more intelligent, it can now select the correct input type for telephone and email fields. Also, it is now possible to to use any HTTP verb in FormHelper::postLink()

PaginatorHelper got a few new and very much anticipated features:

PaginatorHelper::numbers() now has a new option currentTag to allow specifying extra tag for wrapping current page number.
For PaginatorHelper::prev() and PaginatorHelper::next() it is now possible to set the tag option to false to disable the wrapper. Also a new option disabledTag has been added for these two methods.

Finally, helpers got a $settings property, that will be set with any array specified from the controller.

Caching

File Engine is now the default caching engine, this solves quite a few problems with people not having APC installed or forgetting to change the cache prefix when having multiple apps on the same server
It is finally possible to have different full page caches, for example a different cache per subdomain. This is achieved with the new viewPrefix setting in the cache configuration. Configure::write('Cache.viewPrefix', 'YOURPREFIX');

Models

IMPORTANT: Model::find('first') will now return an empty array when no records are found. Make sure you update your tests!

Added support for bigint data types and MySQL FULLTEXT indexes.
Validation::fileSize() was added.

When testing models, or controllers, you can now use CakeTestCase::getMockForModel() for quickly generating model mocks that will have the correct alias, table name and be correctly registered in the ClassRegistry.

Since 2.3.0-RC2 the following bit were changed

Renamed AuthComponent::redirect() to AuthComponent::redirectUrl().
Added "tel" and "email" input type guessing.
Controller::_getViewObject() method for constructing the View object when rendering
Don't set "required" attribute for checkboxes (unless explicitly specified).
Removed Security.level from core.php
Display exact PDO error on default homepage
Allow AuthComponent::$unauthorizedRedirect to be an url.
Added feature to ignore include errors for CakePlugin
Allowed between option for radio buttons to be an array of strings

See the changelog for a full list of changes in 2.3.0[3]

Changes for the 2.2.x branch

Make sure sessions are started before destroying them.
Consistently inflecting theme names, this means that every theme should start with an uppercase as the other folders
Add OK or Successful HTTP codes 200-206 to HttpResponse::isOK(). Fixes #3531
Only bake HABTM associations for tables that exist.
Add support for --admin to bake controller all.
Fixing the way to follow redirects when fetching XML files.
Fix Token fields being added to GET forms.
Allow afterFind() to fully remove an associated record. By returning array() or unsetting the 0'th result an afterFind callback should be able to fully remove data from the results.

The changelog[4] has the full list of changes in 2.2.5

A huge thanks to all involved in terms of both contributions through commits, tickets, documentation edits, and those whom have otherwise contributed to the framework. Without you there would be no CakePHP.

Download a packaged release [1]

Links

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PHP

Monday, January 28, 2013

CakePHP 2.3.0 is out!