CakePHP 4.0.0-alpha1 Released

The CakePHP core team is proud to announce the first alpha release of CakePHP 4.0.0. We’ve been working on this release for several months now feel it is ready for broader feedback from the community.

There are a few high-level goals for the 4.0.0 release that this alpha release delivers upon:

Remove all features and functionality deprecated in 3.x and marked for removal in 4.x Raise the minimum PHP version to 7.1.0. PHP 5 and PHP 7.0 are now end-of-life and we wanted to target a supported version of PHP. We are considering raising the minimum required PHP version to 7.2 and would like your feedback. Greatly improve the usage of typehinting internally to allow internals to be simplified due to less need to type check arguments. Improve error messages across the framework.

New Features While 4.0 focuses on removing deprecated functionality we’ve also found the time to add some great new features: The ORM can now automatically handle timezone conversions between your application server timezone and database timezone if they differ.

CakePHP now supports the PSR-15: HTTP Server Request Handlers specification.

Cake\Http\Client now follows PSR-18: HTTP Client specifications.

now follows PSR-18: HTTP Client specifications. FormHelper now generates HTML5 validation messages and datetime inputs. The migration guide has a complete list of what’s new in 4.0.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading as it notes the various breaking changes present in 4.0.

How you Can Help You can help deliver 4.0 by contributing in one of many ways: Check the documentation for mistakes, outdated, unclear or broken examples. We’ve been trying to update everything but may have not caught everthing. Try it out! Give CakePHP 4.0 a test drive in a non-production application. We’d love to hear how converting a small application went and what was harder than it should have been. File issues for regreessions in existing features, or suggest new features. While we’re not likely to greatly expand the scope of 4.0, we would like input on what should be a part of 4.1 and 4.2. Let us know about unclear error messages or silent failures in CakePHP.