OpenPSA 9.8.0 Released

It has become a bit of a tradition by now: The year-end openpsa release, and 2020 is no exception. A lot has happened in the codebase since 9.7.0, and here are some of the highlights:

We have taken the next step in our great Symfony migration, and this one has been particularly big: MidCOM (the framework layer of OpenPSA) is now running on the full Symfony kernel, with the global getter being the entry point to the DI container. This means that all MidCOM services (RCS, caching, Internationalization and so on) are now injectable and can be configured using standard Symfony YAML files. A good chunk of the initialization work has been moved to the DI container’s compiler phase, which means less work has to be done on each request (and consequently, you need to empty MidCOM’s cache when you change the configuration).

Two concrete advancements that came from this is that the RCS service can now optionally run on a Git backend (which is more widespread by now than decades-old rcs). The logging service is now a wrapper around Monolog, which means that all of the latter’s features can now be used within the framework.

Datamanager also profits from the same improvements for configurability, and now provides better access to the underlying Symfony tools and sports better validation behavior. The dialog UI has received a number of updates, especially for better integration into JS workflows.

Of course, there has been the general modernization work, which brought support for Symfony 5, and the usual slew of JS component updates (elfinder, fancytree, tinymce, galleria, fullcalendar). At the same time we dropped support for PHP 7.0 which is well past its expiration date by now, and removed some old functionality that was only kept for 8.09 compat and reduced efficiency.

On the developer side of things, we now have better error reporting and much improved type safety, more unittests and unittest usability improvements, which should help speed up development down the line. There has also been some work on reduced coupling between the framework and application code, and between components in general. But more on that in a subsequent update.

OpenPSA now also sports somewhat improved responsive behavior, many UI & performance improvements as well as the usual fixes and cleanups.

Enjoy!