The v1.2 branch of Winter CMS with support for PHP 8.0+ & Laravel 9 is ready for general testing. Check out the upgrade guide for instructions on how to start testing it in your projects today!
At this point, any major changes should be addressed and it should be ready for testing with your projects. For myself I am already running it in production for my client sites.
To give you an idea of the state of it as of today; if a potential issue for your projects hasn't been discovered by this point then it is not going to be discovered by anyone until you test it yourself; so my point is don't wait until it's "officially stable", test it out with your projects today! Any issues that have been reported have been able to be resolved very quickly; so at the risk of repeating myself a third time; go forth and test it out! :)
At this point the only work that remains before we push it "officially stable" is a few more general cleanup tasks that we've been wanting to take care of for a while along with some other general improvements like support for Level 5 static analysis on the core code and improvements to our class loader & plugin manager - none of which will be introducing breaking changes.
There are numerous improvements available in v1.2, see the WIP release notes for the full list of changes. Some of the more notable ones include:
- Many improvements to the Console Commands development experience and usage, including support for autocompletion of arguments and improved support for more of the Laravel-provided commands.
- The
create:themecommand can now be used to scaffold a TailwindCSS-based theme. - The icon library used in the backend has been updated from FontAwesome v4 to v6, see the PR for more details.
- Backend template files now use
.phpas their extension rather than.htm - System, Mailer, & CMS twig environments are now separately registered and won't cause conflicts depending on when they're used in the request.
- Added
add{$RelationType}Relation($name, $config)methods to make it easier to dynamically add relationships to third party models. - Very robust support for parsing and programatically generating
.envand PHP ArrayFile (Config & localization) files, opening the door for advanced scaffolding functionality. - Automated Level 5 Static Analysis on the Winter CMS core Storm library which will help to prevent bugs in the future.
- Improvements to the unit testing support (including moving tests to their relevant modules instead of the project root and improvements to the
winter:testcommand) - Performance and reliability improvements to the PluginManager and the Class Loader.
While we've been hard at work on the Laravel 9 upgrade, we've also been working on a few other notable improvements, including the Tailwind UI based backend skin (should be available in the next month or so), continued work on the marketplace, the Winter.Search plugin, and core support for running Winter CMS on Laravel Vapor.
