The CakePHP core team is happy to announce the second release candidate for CakePHP 5.1.0. Since the RC1 release the core team has added new features, and includes bugfixes from the 5.0 releases. Some of the highlights of this work include:

• CakePHP will no longer check that zend.assertions is enabled in non-debug environments. The related ini setting cannot be controlled at the directory level, and cannot be changed in some shared/cloud hosting environments.
• Fixed BehaviorRegistry::removeBehavior() not clearing method maps.
• Fixed deprecations with PHPUnit 11 and made CakePHP base classes compatible with PHPUnit 11.
• Replaced internal usage of md5 with xxh128. This impacts hashes used for group prefixes in Cache.
• Fixed IntegrationTestTrait::enableCsrfToken() causing GET requests that follow a POST request to fail.
• Added toFloat(), toInt(), toString(), toBool(), toDateTime(), toDate() and toBool() to make it more ergonomic to convert request data into type-safe values.
• The new casting functions are used by ControllerFactory to cast parameters for controller actions.
• Components can now leverage the dependency injection container in their constructors.
• Console\Argument::hasArgument() no longer raises errors when arguments are undefined.
• ResultSetDecorator is no longer used internally by the ORM. Instead ResultSet is used directly.
• Added support for geospatial types of GEOMETRY, POLYGON, POINT, and LINESTRING for database drivers that support them and emulated support for SQLite.
• The request returned by Router::getRequest() will now be updated after each middleware is processed, improving request mutations in error pages.
• The default valueSeparator for find(list) is now a space instead of ;. This makes results more useful for interfaces.

What's new in 5.1.0

The migration guide has a complete list of what's new in 5.1.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading as it notes the behavior changes present in 5.1.0.

How you Can Help

You can help deliver 5.1.0 by contributing in one of many ways:

1. Check the documentation <https://book.cakephp.org/5.next/en/>_ for mistakes, outdated, unclear or broken examples.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.
2. Try it out! Give CakePHP 5.1.0 a test drive. Let us know how upgrading went and if there were any rough spots.
3. File issues for regressions in existing features, or suggest new features. Even if those features don't make it into 5.1.0, we're early in the process of planning 5.2 and value community feedback.

Contributors to 5.1.0-RC2

Thank you to all the contributors that have contributed to this release:

• Adam Halfar
• ADmad
• Jamison Bryant
• jun-taniai
• Mark Scherer
• Mark Story
• othercorey

As always, a huge thanks to all the community members that helped make this release happen by reporting issues and sending pull requests.