Pimcore 11: Unleash the Power of Next-Gen

Over the past several months, our dedicated team of Pimconauts has been working tirelessly to bring you a highly anticipated software release. A staggering 840 issues and pull requests have been resolved during the course of the development. The relentless efforts have finally come to fruition. We are proud to announce the official release of Pimcore 11!

Imagine a world where efficiency and scalability work together, empowering your business to thrive in today's competitive landscape. To live up to this approach, Pimcore 11 sets new fundamental standards for the course of the Pimcore Platform. Building on this foundation allows us to be future-proof for the upcoming years and prepare further groundbreaking innovations for the approaching minor releases!

By harnessing the full potential of this next-generation solution, your organization can stay ahead of the curve and position itself as a leader in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Take advantage of the chance to revolutionize your data management strategy!

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the dedicated community of developers and contributors on GitHub who have played a vital role in shaping this release. Your unwavering commitment to actively contributing to the platform means everything to us. Therefore, we are committed to ensuring you get the most out of Pimcore 11! Rest assured, all the exciting updates and enhancements apply to both the Pimcore Community Edition and the Pimcore Enterprise Edition!

Technical Updates & Changes

Pimcore 11 unveils fundamental refactorings, structural enhancements, and optimized integrations designed to ensure ever-increasing performance and reliability in this release – the cornerstone for groundbreaking features yet to come.

The release handles the following sections:

1. Advancing Code Quality and Structure
2. Updating Third-Party Dependencies of Pimcore
3. Refactoring to Reduce Technical Debt
4. Introducing Fundamental Refactorings
5. Focusing on the Ecosystem

1. Advancing Code Quality and Structure

• Distinct Bundles: Less frequently used features have been separated into bundles. This results in a leaner core, increasing flexibility and efficiency in the overall development process.
• Native PHP Types: Pimcore now applies native PHP types to all parameters and return types, leading to a strictly typed Pimcore Core Framework that improves code quality and stability. Pimcore aims to provide an intuitive system for developers to write code and prevent type errors in production.
• Test Coverage and Static Analysis: We've advanced test coverage and added static analysis checks for all packages, substantially increasing quality. These upgrades will significantly benefit the developer community regarding future changes and adaptations.
• Webpack is implemented to pack and install necessary front-end dependencies, such as JavaScript and CSS files for the Pimcore Backend User Interface (UI) - simplifying future updates and ensuring that components stay current. 
• Content Security Policy (CSP): Pimcore has activated CSP as the default setting for the Backend Interface, which helps prevent specific types of attacks, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks. With CSP, we improve the platform's security and minimize the risk of data breaches or other malicious activity.

2. Updating Third-Party Dependencies of Pimcore

• Pimcore 11 is compatible with the latest PHP version 8.2, requiring PHP version 8.1 as a minimum. This update allows us to utilize new language features and so improve code quality, security, and performance, ensuring PHP support and PHP security fixes for at least the next three years.
• Significant maintenance work has been carried out to update all third-party dependencies to their latest versions, allowing to take advantage of their most recent features and benefit from their long-lasting support and security updates – providing Pimcore 11 with a strong foundation for the upcoming years.
• One of the most crucial third-party dependencies, Symfony, has been upgraded to the latest 6.2 version. This upgrade provides access to the most recent features, ongoing support, and security patches for at least the next four years.

3. Refactoring to Reduce Technical Debt

Another vital part of the Pimcore 11 release is refactoring to keep the code base up-to-date and maintainable for the future, leading to an improved developer experience, reduced maintenance efforts, and ensured the stability of the core framework.

Key highlights from this area:

• Removed deprecated features, implementations, and old backward compatibility layers to clean up the code base.
• Updated the core bundles' code structure to conform to the latest conventions and best practices.
• Leveraged standard implementations provided by the new third-party framework versions, such as Symfony, and removed custom implementations (e.g. session handling, authentication, Symfony runtime component) to reduce the complexity of the Pimcore codebase and clean up the code.

4. Introducing Fundamental Refactorings

• Developed an abstraction layer for our WYSIWYG editor and adopted the ultra-modern TinyMCE as our default implementation. With the abstraction layer, we are now able to integrate other WYSIWYG editors seamlessly through extensions.
• Implemented Gotenberg, a highly versatile PDF generator. Gotenberg generates asset document previews of office documents like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and creates PDFs in the web2print module. The best part is its easy integration into the system infrastructure as a microservice (e.g., through a Docker container), which minimizes infrastructure requirements and simplifies overall system complexity.
• Enhanced extensibility by adding support for custom document and asset types. Developers can now effortlessly implement their own types through extensions, fully customizing Pimcore to suit their unique requirements. This new functionality also allows the creation of extensions that support 3D file formats.
• Further refined data modeling capabilities of Pimcore data objects by adding new range data types for data objects (number range, quantity value range, date range).

5. Focusing on the Ecosystem

• Updates have been implemented for all Pimcore extensions to ensure seamless compatibility with Pimcore 11 and that all extensions work harmoniously.
• Integrated all Pimcore extensions into the POEditor translation workflow: This enables our community to translate labels for all Pimcore extensions in their preferred languages, just as it's already possible for Pimcore core. Users can ensure their entire platform is accurately translated, regardless of the language used.
• New Documentation: We will release comprehensive documentation consolidating all Pimcore extensions into a single source with a unified search and the latest technology.

Pimcore is committed to continuous innovation, ensuring our ecosystem remains future-proof and consistently updated with the latest industry standards and best practices. We encourage you to upgrade to Pimcore 11  and experience our latest release firsthand during development . Stay tuned for more updates and releases!

Read the Pimcore Upgrade Guide