Phalcon was released more or less 2 years ago and a lot of good things have happened. Our community is growing every day, many developers are excited to see what Phalcon will bring us in this new year.

A great effort was made by the contributors last year to get here. To all of you thank you very much!

We are happy to announce the release of our first beta of Phalcon 1.3!

In this version we have introduced several new features and performance improvements. The intend of this beta release is get input from the community, test the new functionality making sure everything works fine once production environments are updated to 1.3.

In addition to 2.0, the Phalcon Team is also focused on 1.3, a new version that will include new features, important improvements in the overall memory usage and new components like Phalcon\Image.

Today, we are announcing the release of Phalcon 1.2.4, a maintenance release including several bug fixes, performance improvements and stability fixes available in the 1.3.0 branch.

After some weeks of hard work, long nights, burning the midnight oil (as all programmers do), we have reached a very important milestone in our roadmap for Phalcon 2.0.

Phalcon 2.0 will be a major upgrade as far as the internal code is concerned and the way it operates. We managed to do this without making big changes to the API that would break compatibility. Some minor changes might be introduced, and if they do we will inform everyone well in advance.

Last week, security researchers announced that a new attack towards websites has been discovered called BREACH. This attack allows the attacker to obtain data even if connections are secured with SSL connections. Several web sites and applications could be compromised. Note that this attack could affect any web application no matter the technology (language, os, frameworks, etc) that powers it. Their paper explains the attack and provides full details on how it works.

In short, your application may be affected if:

It’s time to talk about Phalcon 2 and the future of this project.

Despite being a PHP extension implemented in C and its young age, Phalcon offers the same or better features than other frameworks that have been around a lot longer. Phalcon is a fast, robust, secure, extendable PHP framework for everyone to use.

With every release, throughout the development of Phalcon, we have always focused on offering a good balance between new features (driven by the community) and bug fixes/optimizations.

Because of that, some areas of the framework have suffered, mainly unit tests and documentation. Despite the fact that our documentation is very thorough, there is a lot of room for improvement. The same goes with the unit tests of course.

We are happy to announce that Phalcon 1.2.1 is available for download/compile for our users.

This new version of Phalcon includes a lot of optimizations, reducing memory while increasing performance (yet again :))

This new release of the Phalcon framework, contains several new features (mostly requested by the community), bug fixes and various performance improvements. The main changes are highlighted in the beta article. You can see the CHANGELOG for a complete list of changes.

A summary of the new features introduced follows: