Building an Object Relation Mapper (ORM) is no small feat. It is large enough to warrant being a an entire project or framework in its own right given the large desirable feature set. Given that, I thought it a good idea to outline what the plans and direction are for the new FuelPHP ORM as we have lots of improvements and features for you to make use of.

FuelPHP v2 has been “on the horizon” or “just around the corner” for a long time. Unfortunately due to various personal issues in the team work on v2 has been progressing much slower than we would like.

But! That is all about to change! We are very happy to announce that the first alpha version of FuelPHP v2 (v2.a.1) will be released on the 1st of January 2015! No more “just around the corner” and “when it comes”.

The version that we will release will be far from a finished version but will allow the community to play with the new framework and allow us to gather feedback early on in the new version’s life cycle to make sure we grow the framework in the right direction.

A new version of the FuelPHP framework is in the process of being born!

Over the last month, we finally found the time to work on what will become FuelPHP v2.0, and we're moving fast. There's still a lot to do (see the todo list for 2.0-alpha), but in general the new version is taking shape, with more features completed every day.

Time then to highlight some of the changes, and explain what the impact of these changes will be.

Today we've reached another milestone on the way to FuelPHP v2.0: The Database package is finished, fully tested, and ready to be used.

Today we've tagged the first releases for FuelPHP 2.0. As of this version we'll release the core-of-the-core framework as the Kernel package and the other libraries that make up the 1.x Core will be in the new Core packages or their own package. The Kernel has now reached a level that is pretty close to a Release Candidate and could be called production ready, but as we've raised the bar for unit testing the current 60% coverage is too little for a RC release.

Context is what gives meaning to otherwise meaningless or ambiguous statements. This holds true not only in language but in programming as well, or at least it should.

After some internal discussion and already having adopted PSR-0 for 2.0 we have now decided to adopt PSR-1 as well. For the most part we were already following the recommendations put forward in there, but there is one big one: camelCase method names. We understand that many of you will have at the very least mixed feelings about this, we sympathize and share a lot of that feeling having used snake_casing ourselves for as long as we can remember.

While developing FuelPHP 2.0 we took a critical look at all established web application concepts. Nothing was considered out-of-bounds, not even the most well known of all: Model-View-Controller. In this blog we go into how this is commonly implemented and what we feel is wrong with that.

A question that has been asked many times about 2.0 is "why the big changes", in this blog I will attempt to explain the choices made and place them in context.

We are getting ready to come up with our final Roadmap for version 2.0.  We have our ideas about architectual changes, and some new features.  However, we want to know what YOU want.  After all, you are what keeps us going.