CakePHP LTS Version Strategy - cakephp

Question

The CakePHP community has frequent minor release cycles. Can anyone suggest a strategy for selecting an LTS version - specifically a minor version.
Or would the best strategy be to upgrade as frequently as the minor versions are released?

Answer 1

We can assume that the 2.x and 3.x branches get updates for the next few years (i'm not sure, but i think even 1.3 still get security updates if leaks are found)...
So your choice is between 2.x and 3.x where 3.x is cleaner/faster and easier extendible in form of 3th party libraries and 2.x is more wide spread(plugins, tutorials,... ). I would definitely recommend you to go with 3.x due to a higher php version(it's sooo much faster).
Cakephp releases in minor versions (3.0.x) are bug and security fixes. So if you select:
"require": {
"cakephp/cakephp": "3.0.*"
}
you should be just fine for the next few years.
If you than feel like a feature is missing which is present in a newer 3.x release you can always find a migration guide for the newest version in the cookbook: http://book.cakephp.org/3.0/en/appendices/3-0-migration-guide.html as you can see from 2.x to 3.x there are a lot of breaking changes and an update is most likely really time consuming.
In comparison a update from 2.x to 2.6 is less complex as there are primary smaller feature improvements, renaming of functions and stuff like that: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/appendices/2-6-migration-guide.html

Answer 2

CakePHP 3.0.x is the most current branch of CakePHP and if you're starting out with Cake is the best place to start (CakePHP 2.6.x is still being supported for the foreseeable future, but will eventually get dropped).
The recommended way of installing CakePHP is using Composer. If you want to install the current stable release then you want the following in your composer.json file:-
"require": {
"cakephp/cakephp": "3.0.*"
}
This will insure that every time you do a composer update you'll only get bug fixes and minor changes that shouldn't break your app. Ideally you want to ensure your app is bug free so it is a good idea to periodically update Cake with these minor version changes.
When CakePHP 3.1.x is released in the future it is likely to introduce new features that have the potentially to break an app's existing functionality. In this case upgrading needs to be done with caution. You will easily be able to update by modifying your Composer requirement, but the app will need thorough testing. This can potentially be time consuming, so unless you really need the new features is unnecessary.

Answer 3

I would highly recommend CakePHP 3.x if you are starting a new project. However, I was just at the CakePHP Conference in New York and the CakePHP Core Developers indicated they would be supporting 2.x for 2-3 years. That time period greatly hinges upon the community to some degree, they are not just going to stop supporting 2.x. any time soon. They are actually going to backport some of the 3.x features into 2.x. They tentatively plan to Release CakePHP 2.7 and CakePHP 3.1 sometime this summer.
I would also ask have you been using 2.x and what is your comfort level with CakePHP? Depends on the size of the project. I haven't made the jump to 3.x yet, haven't had a new project to try it on yet. I have a ton of code for 2.x like bake scripts and plugins that I have customized, so for profitability on a project I still might consider using 2.x.
There will be some learning with CakePHP 3.x especially if you are coming from 2.x, the ORM is awesome, but it much different than 2.x. So you have to weigh your options. They mentioned tools for upgrading from 2.x to 3.x that might help if you start with 2.x and jump to 3.x later. I don't think at this point I would do that, that is more for people upgrading from 2.x to 3.x. that have existing 2.x projects. I would pick a version and run with it.
The the other answers suggest use composer to install CakePHP. I started using composer about 8 months ago with CakePHP 2.x and love it. With CakePHP 3.x, I recommend using composer, like this if it is installed globally: composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app [app_name]