A couple of days ago we've retweeted the anouncement of a "new" CMS called RebornCMS. This was done under the, maybe somewhat naive, believe that people have put their heart into making something to help out others. This is somethng we respect in all open-source projects. The passion and willingness to do more as a collective than as a single developer is what drives and motivates us, whether these projects are our competitors or products that we've helped to take shape using the FuelPHP framework.

At the beginning of 2012 Jelmer posted an article called "The road ahead", outlining the developments of what then was referred to as "FuelPHP 2.0".

In the 10 months that has followed, a lot has changed. Two members have left the core development team, one of them being the projects founder, and the project has found new leadership. New leadership usually brings change, and for us, there is no exception.

You've seen us ask for you opinions and some of you have seen us taking the first step towards building a new version. This has lead to many questions and in some cases nonsensical speculation. With this blog we want to give you a sense of where we're going and what's ahead for the 1.x branch and 2.0 development.

A few weeks back our site was down for most of the day, which sucked. The start of the problem was a failed deploy of an update to PyroCMS.  Then all hell broke loose.  We basically decided to start from scratch with a fresh install of PyroCMS v2.0 beta.  Since we were starting fresh we also took the opportunity to make a hosting platform move as well.

Phil and I (Dan) were both involved in some early beta testing of Pagoda Box.  I am not going to lie, it was a little rough, like any beta usually is, but we saw a lot of potential.  On Nov. 1st, they completed their transition to a new infrastructure, and simply put, it is awesome.  After testing out the new infrastructure I decided that I wanted to make the switch.

There has been a lot of confusion and inconsistency regarding the name of the framework.  It is about time that we settle it once and for all.

We have changed our Git branches around.  We have done this to help ourselves, and you as well.  The new branching architecture will help us get bug fixes out there faster and with less errors.

We have been kind of quiet lately, and there is a very good reason for that.  I (Dan) have not had internet at home for about 3 weeks now (besides iPhone tethering).  Work has been hectic, and I just have not had the time needed to properly attend to the Framework.  Fear not though, as the situation is being rectified this Friday.

We have been asked many times about why we do this, or why we didn't do that.  Well, we have really good reasons for everything we do.  Let's start by going over our core philosophy:

Simple, Powerful, Lightweight and Fast.

Basically, this means we need to keep everything as simple to use as possible, while making it as powerful, lightweight (low memory usage) and fast as possible.  So, keep these 4 things in mind as we go through.

We know Fuel isn't fully compatible with proposed standards like PSR-0, but a framework is entitled to its own standards and conventions and we chose ours carefully. I'll explain below why the choices were made, but it's also important to know that our autoloader is very efficient. You can add any other autoloader on top of ours and once ours is done after 1 or even no filesystem checks the other one will kick in. Thus compatibility with PSR-0 is easily added without meaningfull overhead.

Yes, we use static classes. So that must mean the principle advantages of dependency injection are impossible right? Wrong.

Dependency injection is about making it possible to completely replace a part of the composition of objects that work together. To reach this goal you should never use "new Object" but always expect the new object to be given or set on your class.