Hope everyone's 2018 is going well so far! I've been working on a couple big projects lately... one long-running project in FuelPHP, and one new project in Laravel. The more I work with Laravel, the more I wish I had stuck with FuelPHP. I ported FuelPHP's temporal model feature to Laravel (https://github.com/gazugafan/laravel-temporal), which has helped, but I miss FuelPHP's architecture. I feel like Laravel fights me at every turn, and debugging what's happening deep in the framework is a nightmare.
So how's everyone else doing? It's been a long time since there was news on the FuelPHP front. Are the FuelPHP devs happy with where the framework is and consider it complete at this point? Have they been beaten down by Fuel's lack of popularity and don't feel like putting time into it anymore? Has anyone else begrudgingly moved on to more actively maintained frameworks? If so, what are you using now? Anyone else have regrets for doing so? Have the FuelPHP devs themselves moved onto other frameworks? Or is there a secret 2.0 release just around the corner?
In any case, thanks to the FuelPHP devs for all their hard work. FuelPHP is solid and still my favorite!
I sort of wish it had one of the causes you mentioned.
Unfortunately, both Steve and I are troubled with quite serious health issues, leaving Steve with just the abilty to cope with a normal working day, and me without the ability to work at all.
So no, there is no 2.0 around the corner. The bit of energy I have left I spend on addressing issues and fixing bugs, and making sure the codebase stays at par with PHP's releases.
One of our early adopters, the London based software development company FlexCoders Ltd, has sort of agreed to see if they can take over the development, both to secure long term support for the current framework code, and to develop a new incarnation to drive their future application development.
In recent discussions they felt that the direction we took with our 2.0 attempts where, although sensible and understandable, pulling the framework to much towards Laravel, and with that there was too much emphasis on the theory of how things should be done (with design patterns that are sometimes very theoretic, and very java-esk), and not enough on the easy and simplicity that make Fuel the framework of choice for many.
I hope this will lead to a more concrete agreement soon, but there are still issues to discuss. For example, I don't want Fuel to end up like CodeIgniter, which went down because it's owner was more intrested into making money from their product make by the framework than by the framework itself. So some form of independency would be required. I also want to make sure it will remain open source.
And if possible I'd like to be part of it all. Although it technically isn't my baby (I joined the team about a month after Dan started it), I've been working on it for over 7 years now, and it sort of feels like a child you don't want to let go. ;-)
Oh no. I'm so sorry to hear about you and Steve's health problems. Nothing saps your energy and motivation away like being sick, and it's of course completely understandable that you wouldn't have any left to work on this. I hope you both make a full recovery and are able to get back on your feet soon.
Glad to hear FuelPHP at least has a shot at a future still. I haven't looked at the 2.0 branch much, so I'm not exactly sure what direction it was headed. I think I remember seeing DI in there, which reminds me of Laravel. The one thing I do like in Laravel is the use of traits. I like the idea of a more component-oriented approach, where you can just plugin functionality to different classes as you see fit instead of having to make everything fit into one big class hierarchy.
Anyways... thanks again for all you guys have done. I'll at least be using Fuel for the foreseeable future on the long-term projects that were built on it. I hope you get to keep your "baby" and it gets to keep growing ;)
Good to hear that you are into Laravel project. I see you have ported FuelPHP's temporal model feature to Laravel. Before the laravel installation, I noticed the model directory structure in larave 8 included. Also, in Laravel 8, Eloquent model factories are now class-based with improvement in support for relationships between factories.
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