The CakePHP core team is happy to announce the first release candidate for CakePHP 5.4.0. The 5.4 release includes several behavior changes to increase correctness and new features. The highlights of those include:
What's new in 5.4.0
The migration guide has a complete list of what's new in 5.4.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading as it notes the behavior changes present in 5.4.0.
- The default eager loading strategy for
HasManyandBelongsToManyassociations has changed fromselecttosubquery. If you need the previous behavior, explicitly set'strategy' => 'select'when defining associations. Model.afterSaveCommitandModel.afterDeleteCommitevents are now fired whensave()ordelete()is called inside an outer transaction.Collectionhadkeys(),values(),implode(),when()andunless()methods added.- Commands now have
$this->ioand$this->argsset by CakePHP. This will become the default in 6.0, andexecute()will no longer receive io & args parameters. - Database queries now support
notBetween(),inOrNull(),notInOrNull(),isDistinctFrom(),isNotDistinctFrom(),except(),exceptAll(), andstringAgg()operators/functions added. - Support for
brin,hash,gin, andspgistindexes for postgres was added. TestCase::mockModel()has been added to enable mocking of table classes using Mockery.- New filesystem utilities were added for fluent file discovery with pattern matching, and cross-platform path manipulation was added.
Security::encrypt()can now be configured to use longer keys with separate encryption and authentication keys that are derived from the provided key.- Added
Text::mask()method which masks a portion of a string with a repeated character.
How you Can Help
You can help deliver 5.4.0 by contributing in one of many ways:
- Check the documentation for mistakes, outdated, unclear or broken examples. We've been trying to update the documentation as we go, but there are likely examples or sections we've missed.
- Try it out! Give CakePHP 5.4.0 a test drive. Let us know how upgrading went and if there were any rough spots.
- File issues for regressions in existing features, or suggest new features. Even if those features don't make it into 5.4.0, we're early in the process of planning 5.5 and 6.0 and value community feedback.
Contributors to 5.4.0-RC1
Thank you to all the contributors that have contributed to this release:
- ADmad
- Application-drop-up
- celsowm
- Jamison Bryant
- Jasper Smet
- Joachim Rey
- Kevin Pfeifer
- Mallik Hassan
- Mark Scherer
- Mark Story
- Masatoshi Ogiwara
- othercorey
As always, a huge thanks to all the community members that helped make this release happen by reporting issues and sending pull requests.