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:

The Phalcon Team is constantly trying to find ways of making Phalcon even faster while keeping a good balance in terms of features offered and performance.

Today, we are happy to announce that profile-guided optimizations are available in Phalcon!

Success story from our community member Nikita Vershinin:

We are happy to announce the release of our first beta of Phalcon 1.2!

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 1.2.

This post is quite technical, explaining the inner workings of Phalcon.

As a web developer, you don’t need to know how it works (most of the times) so long as it works, and works well. However we believe that this article will allow users of the framework to understand some of the inner workings of Phalcon, and allow them to make decisions on the hardware they use, so as to maximize performance for their applications.

Further popular demand by our community, we have opened a modest store where we have Phalcon stickers ready for you to purchase!

In the near future we will add more swag for your collection so that you can show off Phalcon proudly!

Yet another success story from our community member Michael (Xpundel).

Our main website and the forum are powered by Phalcon Framework, both are open sourced and published on Github, you can use them as example to create your own applications or if you want to see how real websites perform with Phalcon.

Looking at our web analytics, so far this year (1-Jan-2013/30-Abr-2013) we have served 67,566 visits, with 27,204 unique visitors (about 12,000 visits every month) having 232,819 pages served. In comparison, all the past year, despite just starting the project, we have served 100,136 visits (56,368 unique visitors).

Amazing projects need amazing tools. We might not know you just yet, but we think you’d be a great fit for building a better web. Together, we’re ready to change the world!

Here at Phalcon, we’re building a new generation framework for PHP, we want to give you amazing performance, while help you develop with ease and fun.