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We have a final

So the Symphony 2.3.1 release was great, and the upcoming 2.3.2 builds on that and makes Symphony even better! This release is mainly a cleanup of the 2.3.x branch, offering a lot of behind the scenes fixes and documentation updates, restoring PHP5.2 support, adding PHP5.4 support and fixes that pesky bug in the Datasource Editor :)

If you are an extension developer who has been looking forward to the future and has implemented the prepareImportValue function, you might want to take a look at the improvements to the ImportableField interface which add the flexibility of the ExportableField class.

Yupi! I'm not extension developer but, was looking forward for test this new release, and following the things watching on Github.

Nice work guys! As a Ruby developer friend say that "Ruby is of daddy" to him, SymphonyCMS is CMS of daddy, to me. I don't know if make sense in english, sorry if not.

Cheers.

Just an update, a second beta should be out this weekend. We're pushing for a final release in February, which should be definitely doable!

Thanks to all who have given the 2.3.2 Beta a whirl and provided your feedback so far. Most of the reported issues have been fixed and therefore a 2.3.2 Beta 2 is now available. I'm hopeful that this will be the last Beta before a Release Candidate, possibly in a fortnight.

Get it

There is a couple of pretty cool features now available in this Beta, well one was silently released in 2.3.1 but anyway...

Delegate Profiling

The Profile Devkit extension has been updated with a new experimental feature, 'Delegate Profiling'. While the UI is unimpressive, the information is very useful! It reports what extensions are using what delegates, how long they took to process and how many queries the extension triggered. This should prove to be a very useful feature for all extension developers and those trying to debug performance of their installations.

Delegate Profiling

As I mentioned, the UI is poor at the moment, but I have a couple of pages of sketches to overhaul the entire Profile Devkit UI to make it really cool. I hope to connect with Nils and Stephen soon to see what they can do :)

Datasource parameter suggestions

Nils has implemented parameter suggestions for the DataSource Editor. To invoke, just start typing {$ in the filters and all available parameters will be displayed in an autocomplete style UI. No more typos!

Datasource Parameter suggestions

Other minor cool features

  • Markdown extension has been updated to 1.15. This includes new versions of the PHP Markdown Extra parser and PHP SmartyPants. The cool thing about this is support for HTML5 markup and, AND, you can now add attributes to Markdown like id or class.
  • Debug Devkit extension has been updated with an updated Bitter library which adds better XSL highlighting and should be a tad quicker. Note that the update is not 'new' code from Rowan, it's just updating what the extension had to something more recent.

Extension Developers

While building your extensions it would be mindful to think about PHP5.4 support. The core support is almost there, if not already, but it's now up to extension developers to help make it a reality for users. The quickest way you test your extension is to modify this line to just have E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE options. Regardless of your version of PHP, this will expose the majority of errors that PHP5.4 users may be seeing. The PHP guys have a migration guide for PHP5.4 that should be pretty helpful :)

I'm also hoping to start a mailing list/something automated to make Core API more noticeable. At first it will include a recap of deprecated things and some best practices, but I expect it to be busier as Symphony 2.4 development starts. If you'd like to be included in on this, send a tweet to @symphonycms. In the meantime, have you checked out Contributing to Symphony?

Awesome! It's great to see PHP 5.4 support is pretty much there and I love the autosuggest for datasource parameters. The additions to markdown support is actually quite timely too. Great work!

I note that if you install Symphony via Git without specifying a branch, you automatically get the beta. I guess this is probably wrong.

Whoops, I forgot to log that issue when I spotted that last week...

After testing and a cleanup of our issue tracker, I'm happy to announce the availability of 2.3.2 Release Candidate 1. This release provides the most stable core yet including many UI and stability fixes. If there are no major issues reported, this version will be released as final on March 8th. Enjoy!

Get it

It is anticipated that this will be the last release in the 2.3.x branch with work beginning on the exciting 2.4 release.

Attachments:
symphony2.3.2RC1.zip

It may be useful for developers to also start familiarising themselves with The Migration Guide to 2.4 for Developers. It will change over time, but that's the gist of the current state of play.

That IS an exciting Migration Guide :)

Page-based sections have been a long time coming... Super excited for that feature alone!

Is there a canonical roadmap for 2.4 features, timeline etc?

Thanks Brendan for the roadmap. Sounds all promising. Bootstrapping Sections and Pages from xml is cool. Will the bootstrapped objects be cached?

Will the bootstrapped objects be cached?

Yes. A long time ago @nickdunn floated the concept of caching the core, using separate cache drivers for structure and content.

I want to abstract the current Cache class using Providers so that developers can have more control over the caching used on the their site as at the moment it's always 'database' caching. This will allow new extensions that implement APC, file, memcached, redis etc. to take control of caching.

Early days, but that's the point of a roadmap I guess :)

Whoot, in memory cache! Excellent!

If you are interested, I've written a small cacheing bundle that is driver based. At the moment, there're two drivers available (filesystem and memcached) and it's only php54+ but it can easily be backported to php53+.

+1 for more agressive caching. While I love the flexibility and the possibilities Symphony offers, websites seem to get sluggish quite fast when the projects get bigger, and the number of datasources and the lines of XML grows.

If only I had more time!

+1 for more agressive caching. While I love the flexibility and the possibilities Symphony offers, websites seem to get sluggish quite fast when the projects get bigger, and the number of datasources and the lines of XML grows.

Yes, we've noticed this too. Symphony 2.3 has a bunch of optimisations that vastly improve this, but there is still ways to go.

The biggest is that the FieldManager groups SQL queries by field type. In < 2.3, a Section object would iterate over each field and produce a single SQL query to get that field's settings. If you have 20 input fields in your section, that was 20 queries. In 2.3, it's 1 query. This is a hard optimisation to show using the default ensemble, but it shines on larger sites with many fields in Sections, trust me :)

+1 for more agressive caching. While I love the flexibility and the possibilities Symphony offers, websites seem to get sluggish quite fast when the projects get bigger, and the number of datasources and the lines of XML grows.

Yep. https://github.com/symphonycms/symphony-2/issues/1676

Thanks for the updates brendo and michael, I've been emailing with the guys at fortrabbit, because performance on their platform was very bad (2.5s to load a page which takes 300ms on my VPS).

It turns out that Symphony is not well tuned for platforms where the storage is on a NFS and the database has latency, and more intelligent caching mechanisms will make a huge difference here. The more attention this gets, the better!

Exciting stuff. Thanks guys

Apologies for the delay and lack of communication, but I've decided to hold the Symphony 2.3.2 release back a little until some issues can be resolved when running on PHP5.4.

We've noticed a couple of issues with one of our sites which is being deployed to a load balanced Rackspace environment which implements it's own persistent session management. Symphony implements it's own session management using the database but it looks like this has some issues when running on PHP5.4 in this environment.

With the rising popularity of cloud hosting, this issue is likely to be present in similar hosting providers and affect other users. I know there is some work being done on rehauling the Session management for Symphony 2.4, but work of that scale is not a viable option for a minor release so we are working to patch the current issue for an immediate release.

The resulting fix will be part of an RC2, and then we'll have our usual two week testing window. I anticipate the final release of 2.3.2 will be before the end of March.

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