We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 3.0.2 [LTS].

This release marks another small milestone in the evolution of Phalcon, addressing a number of bugs and making the framework better for all of us :)

A big thank you to all of our contributors and the community!!

One of the most requested features by the community, is an easy way to install and upgrade Phalcon.

Admittedly, a lot of us have installed Phalcon so many times that it is second nature to perform the task. However some developers might find the task daunting, especially if this is the first time they are trying to install the framework.

To help with this task, we have employed the services of PackageCloud.io, so as to create packages for PhalconPHP. With PackageCloud.io users can now add the relevant repository to their distribution, and install Phalcon with the package manager of their choice.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 3.0.1 [LTS].

This maintenance release fixes bugs and improve the stability of Phalcon:

The Phalcon team is very excited to share some news with our community!

The last few months, we have been working hard to push 2.1 out, which contains significant enhancements as well as some API changes that require attention so as not to break compatibility with your application. On top of that we have been working in making Zephir PHP7 compatible so that you can enjoy Phalcon in your PHP7 application. Some news first though:

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 2.0.13!

This maintenance release number of bug fixes (outlined below). We had 2 more minor releases providing minor fixes since our last blog post, and the CHANGELOG for those is listed below:

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 2.1 RC 1!

This version is our first LTS version and it will be supported 3 years from its final release date. Also, this will be our last release candidate before the final version of Phalcon 2.1.

Phalcon 2.1 introduces a great number of improvements, striving to make Phalcon even a better framework. Final version will be available in two weeks.

PHP7 was released on the 3rd of December, 2015. This new version brought forward a large number of new and exiting features (https://php.net/manual/en/migration70.new-features.php) to PHP. Perhaps one of the biggest of the new features is a new Zend Engine (the engine that powers PHP).

This new engine, code named PHPNG, will give some of your applications double the performance speed.

Some benchmarks that have been run so far:

• WordPress 3.6 – 20.0% gain (253 vs 211 req/sec)
• Drupal 6.1 – 11.7% gain (1770 vs 1585 req/sec)
• Qdig – 15.3% gain (555 vs 482 req/sec)
• ZF test app – 30.5% gain (217 vs 166 req/sec)

It is only natural that once it came out the PhalconPHP community was dying to know when we would get a chance to work with PhalconPHP and PHP7.

The Problem

We all know that PhalconPHP is written in Zephir starting with version 2.0, and that this language compiles its code into a C PHP Extension. Because of PHP7’s new engine the extension had to be rewritten and adapted to the new specifications.

The Solution

Knowing this, the PhalconPHP team started working since last year on an updated version of Zephir to make the compiled code work with PHP7.

After a few months we are finally delivered PhalconPHP 2.1 and Zephir 0.9.x which brings PHP7 support.

Installing PhalconPHP with PHP7

You will need to install PHP7+ and Zephir 0.9.2a-dev (or its latest branch). After you have them installed go to PhalconPHP 2.1.0+ branch and download the source code.

Installation example:

root@localhost:~$ cd cphalcon-2.1.x/
root@localhost:~/cphalcon-2.1.x$ zephir build —backend=ZendEngine3

If you get these warnings ignore them:

Warning: Variable "_SESSION" assigned but not used in Phalcon\Session\Adapter::remove in /root/cphalcon-2.1.x/phalcon/session/adapter.zep on 204 [unused-variable]

     }
    -^

Warning: Variable "beforeLine" assigned but not used in Phalcon\Debug::showTraceItem in /root/cphalcon-2.1.x/phalcon/debug.zep on 339 [unused-variable]

       beforeLine, firstLine, afterLine, lastLine, i, linePosition, currentLine;
    -------------^

Warning: Variable "possibleSetter" declared but not used in Phalcon\Mvc\Model::assign in /root/cphalcon-2.1.x/phalcon/mvc/model.zep on 440 [unused-variable]

      var key, keyMapped, value, attribute, attributeField, possibleSetter, metaData, columnMap, dataMapped;
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------^

Warning: Function "\\sodium\\randombytes_buf" does not exist at compile time in /root/cphalcon-2.1.x/phalcon/security/random.zep on 119 [nonexistent-function]

       return \\Sodium\\randombytes_buf(len);
    ----------------------------------------^

Warning: Function "\\sodium\\randombytes_uniform" does not exist at compile time in /root/cphalcon-2.1.x/phalcon/security/random.zep on 310 [nonexistent-function]

       return \\Sodium\\randombytes_uniform(len);
    --------------------------------------------^

Compiling...
Installing...
Extension installed!
Don't forget to restart your web server

root@localhost:~/cphalcon-2.1.x$  service php-fpm restart

That’s it!

You now have PhalconPHP and PHP7 working.

Can you expect PhalconPHP to be even faster? No, but you can expect to see your your app be much faster since your PHP code will run better with the new engine. Plus, you won’t have any overhead since PhalconPHP is a extension. The best part of all this is that you get all the new features that PHP7 brings to the table.

Do take into account that PHP7 is still rather new, and most of the commonly used extensions like memcache, memcached, and redis are available in Dev/Beta branches, so you need to reinstall them.

Best of luck to all and enjoy PhalconPHP + PHP7.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 2.0.10!

This is the tenth maintenance release in the 2.0.x series, adding more fixes and improvements to make the most of Phalcon.

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Phalcon 2.0.9!

This is the ninth maintenance release in the 2.0.x series, adding more fixes and improvements to make the most of Phalcon.