CakePHP 3.1.0 Released
The CakePHP core team is happy to announce the immediate availability of CakePHP
3.1.0. This release is an API stable release for 3.1. 3.1 delivers a number of
improvements to the 3.x release series.
New in 3.1
ORM Enhancements
A big part of 3.1 was making the ORM even more awesome than it already is.
Lazy Eager Loading
You can now Lazily Eager Load Associations. This feature allows you to
conditionally load additional associations into a result set, entity or
collection of entities:
Additional Filtering Methods
You may have already used matching() on the query object. In 3.1 you can
also use notMatching() to create a negated matching query:
You can use the leftJoinWith() and innerJoinWith() methods to join
associations without loading columns from those associations. This makes it easy
to do filtering on associations:
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:
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:
You can also get instances of helpers and call any public methods on them:
CakePHP provides a Progress and Table helper that you can use to make your CLI
tools look better.
Refreshed Default Application Styles
The styling used in the application skeleton have been streamlined and offer
improved rendering on smaller devices. In addition to cleaner visuals, bake
templates have been updated to create cleaner markup as well.
The above screenshot gives you a taste of what the new default styles look like.
Important Changes From 3.0
While none of the following changes modify method signatures, the behaviour of
specific methods is slightly different than in the past:
FlashComponent now stacks Flash messages created with the set()
or __call() methods. This means that the structure in the Session for
stored Flash messages has changed.
New configuration option 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
configuration. 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() callback.
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.
Other Enhancements
The default route class has been changed to DashedRoute in the
cakephp/app repository. 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.
Validation::latitude(), and Validation::longitude() were added.
Validation::ascii(), Validation::utf8(), and
Validation::isInteger() were added.
Cache::add() was ported from 2.x. This method allows you to atomically add
data to a cache backend if the key did not already exist.
Time::listTimezones() now supports options to display timezone
abbreviations.
Hash::get() now supports objects implementing ArrayAccess.
Hash::sort() supports case-insensitive sorting through a new
ignoreCase option.
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.
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
using the ViewBuilder.
The 3.1 migration guide has
a full list of all the changes in 3.1.0 and is recommended reading for those
considering upgrading.
Upgrading your Application
You can use composer to upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1:
This will install the new core libraries, update bake and DebugKit. You should
then address any deprecation warnings in your application, as deprecated
features will be removed in the future. If you are using the default CSS
provided with the application skeleton, you should also pull in the most recent
CSS in cakephp/app as the default styling and bake templates have been
refreshed.
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.