Today we’re pleased to announce the first release-candidate for Phalcon 2.0. This release has been quite a while in the making, and includes new features, improvements and a clean and friendly code base.

As with all pre-release packages, this is not for production use. But if you’d like to take some of the new features for a spin, or to help find and fix bugs (which should be reported to the issue tracker).

This post has been cross posted from Lezgro’s blog, written by Pavlo Pastushenko

Today we’re very excited to announce the release of the third beta (and possibly last one) of Phalcon 2!

Phalcon 2 is almost fully functional and stable as Phalcon 1.x, virtually all tests in 1.x are now passing 2.0. If you haven’t tried Phalcon 2 out, it’s time to give it a shot!

This version is maintenance release of the Phalcon 1.3.x branch and it has a contributions from our community and fixes to the framework. We thank everyone that has worked on this release, especially with their contributions both to 1.3.3 and our work in progress 2.0.0.

Many thanks to everyone that have contributed either on Github or through discussion in our forum to this version.

It’s been a while since we last communicated with our community. Rest assured our resolve and determination towards the project remains the same :)

We’re in the process putting the final touches on the second major release of Phalcon in its two years of life. Phalcon 2 is powered by Zephir a brand new high-level language that makes the development more enjoyable and easier.

Phalcon 2 now implements most of the functionality that Phalcon 1.x offers and it’s now passing an important number of tests in Travis. Yay!

Today we are launching a new site that would help us spread the word about Phalcon and show where Phalcon is used, whether this is production applications, hobby projects or tutorials.

Introducing builtwith.phalcon.io

Taking the example from our friends at AngularJS we have cloned their repository and we have Phalcon-ized it. Special thanks to the AngularJS team as well as Ole Aass (website) who is leading the project.

We are today releasing the much awaited 1.3.2 version.

This version has a ton of contributions from our community and fixes to the framework. We thank everyone that has worked on this release, especially with their contributions both to 1.3.2 and our work in progress 2.0.0.

Many thanks to dreamsxin, mruz, kjdev, Cinderella-Man, andreadelfino, kfll, brandonlamb, zacek, joni, wandersonwhcr, kevinhatry, alkana and many others that have contributed either on Github or through discussion in our forum.

Eight months ago we announced the creation of a new high-level compiled language called Zephir which we used to completely rewrite Phalcon 2.0.

Zephir’s purpose is to offer a new and easier syntax of writing PHP extensions, translating its PHP/JS inspired syntax to C instructions and thus allowing more and more developers to be involved with the project. In addition, it offers the ability to create new PHP extensions without the need to know C or any of the PHP internals.

For us and thanks to Zephir, the development of Phalcon is now more enjoyable. We have to deal less and less with low-level details and our base code is more readable for anyone who wants to understand, contribute and improve Phalcon.

Yesterday (2014-04-05) we had our first Phalcon community hangout. The main purpose of the hangout was to meet the community, discuss about what Phalcon is and what our future steps are, and hear news, concerns, success stories from the community itself.

We are excited to announce that the first Phalcon community hangout was a great success!