What’s new in CakePHP 1.2?

An often heard question is “What are the differences between CakePHP 1.1 and CakePHP 1.2?”. So with this post I try to give you a short overview of the differences between those two versions (if you miss an important change in the list below, please let me know and I will append it). As CakePHP 1.2 is still under development, not all topics listed below are fully implemented yet. And for many topics there is no documentation available yet.

1. New file extension for view files (.ctp instead of .thtml)
2. Definition of routes in app/config/routes.php changed a bit (Router::connect instead of $Route->connect)
3. Integrated test suite
4. A growing number of core classes are tested (cake/tests/cases)
5. Three new core components: Auth, Cookie, and Email
6. Support for DB2, Oracle and Sybase
7. Support for global Javascript and CSS files (vendors/js resp. vendors/css)
8. Model behaviors
9. Three core behaviors: Acl, Translate, Tree
10. Form related functions have been moved from the HTMLHelper to the FormHelper
11. Four new core helpers: Js, Paginator, Rss, and Xml
12. Support for themes
13. i18n and l10n support
14. Command line console (bake2 will probably get integrated into this new console infrastructure)
15. More advanced validation
16. Dot notation for HtmlHelper and FormHelper (Model.field instead of Model/field), thanks to Dieter@be for the hint
17. Named arguments (thanks to poLK)
18. New core classes: Set (thanks to poLK), Debugger, HttpSocket, Socket
19. More advanced caching facilities. Support for APC, memcache, xcache, file-based and database-based caching