5.0 Roadmap

New Features

General

• PHP 8.1+ (enumerations, read-only properties)
• Add native type hints to method parameters and returns except null|void and external/PSR interfaces.
• Add native type hints for properties where possible
• Normalize passing $config array to initialize() and document that it is unmerged. (rejected)
• Change Behaviors to accept any RepositoryInterface not just Table (https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/issues/11861) (https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/14499) (rejected)

Changes

General

• Remove all deprecated code from 4.x
• Fix array type requirement for Event data (https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/issues/14482)
• Cleanup of return types around nullable: Revert the revert https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/12365 File and Folder have been removed in 5.x
• object|false => object|null so that also ? nullable typehinting becomes possible. Refs https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/13816 This is unnecessary since false can now be used as return type.
• Stricter config getters ( https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/13780 )

Clean finder options/argument separation

• Find clean way to separate query options and custom finder arguments. https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/issues/12690 https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/12787 (Implemented in 5.0)

Commands

• Logging inside commands should output to stdout without interrupting other custom logging contexts.

Core + Controller + Commands

• Component::shutdown() callback rename to ::afterFilter() to match controller.
• Fix up CLI exception code ( https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/13588 )

Database + ORM + Validation

• Remove the __call() magic method and ability to implicitly iterate \Cake\Database\Query instance. It's a major cause of confusion for new users. #15665
• Add 'Time' only type #14148
• Change Driver::quote() typehints to (string, int) to match PDO::quote().
• Revisit $when = true default ( https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/14370 )
• Merge the SqlGeneratorInterface with TableSchemaInterface (rejected for 5.0)

I18n

• Fix up domain names from multi-namespace plugin names (cake_d_c/users => cake_d_c_users and the same for the file name then to match this) to not collide with other non plugin domains. (https://github.com/cakephp/docs/pull/6585)

TestSuite

• Remove the PHPUnit listener. Leaving only the extension behind.
• Fold fixture record loading into the Fixture strategies so that loading/resetting are co-located and can be swapped if necessary.

View

• addHelpers() instead of setHelpers() for merge, setHelpers without 2nd arg. ( https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/14435 )
• Remove engines from NumberHelper and TextHelper.

Rector Transformations

• getTypeName() into get_debug_type() (https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/pull/15686)
• Rename FrozenTime and FrozenDate to DateTime and Date.
• Add native types to Entity implementations. Properties like _hidden and _virtual will need native types applied. See this pull request
• Replace Controller::loadModel() with Controller::fetchTable()
• Replace Command::loadModel() with Command::fetchTable()
• Add a return type to Command::execute() and Command::run().
• Add a return value to Command subclasses that have a null return. We should replace the null/void return with return static::CODE_SUCCESS.
• Rename Cake\ORM\Query to Cake\ORM\SelectQuery pull request.
• Replace Query order() with orderBy(), orderAsc() with orderByAsc() and orderDesc() with orderByDesc()
• Replace Query group() with groupBy()
• Replace WindowInterface order() with orderBy()
• Create rules for updating methods dropped in Chronos 3 https://github.com/cakephp/chronos/issues/335