The CakePHP core team is proud to announce the first release candidate of CakePHP 4.4.0. The 4.4.0 release will introduce several new features and a handful of deprecations.

New Features

The migration guide has a complete list of what's new in 4.4.0. We recommend you give that page a read when upgrading as it outlines the deprecations present in 4.4.

New Feature Highlights

• CakePHP 4.4.0 requires PHP 7.4+
• bin/cake routes now highlights route collisions.
• The SQLite driver now uses RETURNING * to update entities after saving with sqlite >=3.35+
• Query::expr() was added as a shorter alias for Query::newExpr().
• A new more extensible error handling subsystem has been added. The existing inheritance based system is now deprecated.
• HttpsEnforcerMiddleware now has an hsts option that allows you to configure the Strict-Transport-Security header.
• Controller::viewClasses() was added. This can be implemented by controllers that need to perform content-type negotiation. View classes will need to implement the static method contentType() to participate in content-type negotiation.

How you Can Help

You can help by trying out the RC in your application. Please open issues for any new test failures or regressions the new version creates in your application.

Contributors to 4.4.0-RC1

Thank you to all the contributors that have helped with 4.4.0:

• ADmad
• Alejandro Ibarra
• Corey Taylor
• Gerhard Lechner
• Jorge González
• Kevin Pfeifer
• Mark Scherer
• Mark Story
• Markus Ramšak
• saeideng

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