Phing development update

The last Phing development update was almost a year ago, so I guess it’s about time for a discussion of what’s new in Phing world.

2.5.0 and Semantic Versioning

The most important news in this update is the brand new 2.5.0 release (pushed out yesterday). We bumped the minor version number because we now (try to) follow the Semantic Versioning spec, and this release introduces new functionality. Our changed roadmap reflects this as well.

This version closes the following issues:

Other goodies

The past few months Phing has seen a few interesting additions:

• Composer packager support (we’re listed on Packagist as well)
• phploc task
• apply task
• improved phpdoc(2) support
• lots of documentation, bug and other fixes

GitHub

The move to GitHub in early 2012 has been very successful in speeding up Phing’s development. We can definitely still use your help though, so fork our project and submit a pull request. Thanks!

Phing development update 01/04/2012

Roughly a month ago I posted the first in, what should become, a series of development updates concerning Phing. This second blog post details the most important updates during the past four weeks as Phing is moving steadily towards another release (2.4.10 is due out next week).

User Guide starts move to DocBook format

The biggest commit last month was without a doubt the merge of Johan Persson’s docbook5 branch, which adds a DocBook 5 version of the entire Phing User Guide,  accompanied by its own rendering infrastructure. This feature has been on my personal wishlist for a long time, and it’s finally around the corner! The new docs will probably not make it into 2.4.10, but, at some point in the coming weeks, the ‘live’ user guide (on the Phing website) will be switched to the new format. The 2.4.11 packages will also contain the new docs.

Liquibase docs

After succesfully merging the Liquibase tasks last month, Stephan Hochdörfer completed the addition by submitting a pull request containing the necessary documentation!

PhpDocumentor

You’ve probably heard about this, the popular documentation tools phpDocumentor and DocBlox have merged! Phing supports the new phpDocumentor releases by adding a phpdoc2 task.

PHP 5.4 compatibility

Phing itself seems to work fine with the recently released PHP 5.4, however, the unit tests experienced some problems – these have been corrected to make sure the (unstable) snapshot builds are pushed out regularly.

PHAR package

Starting with the upcoming 2.4.10 release, each new version of Phing will also be available as a PHAR package. Initially, this will just contain Phing itself (similar to the PEAR package). After that, the package will be expanded with a few popular dependencies (depending on feedback).

Various (bug)fixes, the 2.4.10 release

Last but not least, here’s a list of tickets that have been closed since the last update.