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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.
For v2.a.1 we will have the basic MVC functionality along with config, lang, fieldset, validation, database, asset, crypt/security and event. All of these are rewritten mostly from the ground up, allowing for a fresh start with clean code.
An initial version of the new ORM will also be included in the alpha release but with very limited functionality and serve as a basic active record implementation in this release. As the ORM is large enough to be a framework in itself I will be covering the future of the orm in more depth in a future blog post.
We would like to stress that this will be an alpha release and therefore not fit for production, likely to change and potentially buggy, it is intended as a preview. By all means start new projects on it, in fact we would encourage you to do so, just keep in mind that nothing is final until we hit a beta version.
The minimum PHP version that we will officially support for v2 is 5.5. Whilst most packages will run fine on 5.4 or lower it is recommended that you run PHP 5.5 or later.
All components of v2 can be installed via composer, most of which can also be used as standalone packages and are under the “fuelphp” organization on github. At the moment the quickest way to get started with v2 is to clone fuelphp/fuelphp then run a “composer install”. In the future we want to support composer’s installer feature for even quicker installation.
It is important to note that there is a fundamental change in the way that v2 works compared with v1. There are no longer separate concepts of “apps”, “packages” and “modules”. Instead v2 uses a concept of “components”. Components can be routable, contain core extensions, config and lang files and even other components. This makes it much easier and quicker to use and does away with the confusion that existed between v1’s packages and modules.
There are a few things we need to finish off before we can publish the first alpha release. We want to be able to provide an asset manager, cryptography and/or security package for this alpha release so you can get started building applications. There is also a minor issue with component inheritance that needs to be solved for config and lang before the alpha is released.
In the long run we also want to add theme, cache, auth functionality and more session drivers in future alpha versions. Then for the first beta we are looking at finishing the cli, image, migrations and profiler packages. There will be more on this closer to the time so watch this space!
The FuelPHP team would like to introduce Márk Sági-Kazár (sagikazamark) as the latest addition to the FuelPHP development team. Having used it since 2011, and contributed the Email package to version 2, Mark is no stranger to FuelPHP. He has also worked on cleaning up the dependency package and generally the shape and structure of v2. We're very happy to have Mark aboard!