Pimcore 5: First public alpha version released!

Hello guys, dear Pimcore community!

Today is an awesome day for the whole Pimcore crew and our great community. During the last months, we have been working very hard to bring you the latest and greatest release of Pimcore. As many of you have already guessed, Pimcore 5 will be powered by todays leading PHP framework, the Symfony Framework 3, instead of the now deprecated Zend Framework 1. This transition was necessary in order to keep Pimcore up to date and a modern software platform. We think that this is tremendous news for the Pimcore community and its future. And today you can start playing with the first alpha release of Pimcore 5.

Grab the latest install package using the following link https://www.pimcore.org/download-5/pimcore-unstable.zip (always pointing to the latest build) and follow the development in real-time on GitHub https://github.com/pimcore/pimcore. You can use already the integrated updater to keep your alpha version up to date. As there will be new builds almost every day, subscribe to our Github page and update often. Please be aware that today’s Pimcore 5 release is still an early alpha version that will change a lot during the next months, transitioning through various public alpha and beta releases, before being finally released in the end of September or beginning of October 2017 at this years’ Pimcore Partner Conference in Salzburg, Austria.

We have not only worked on Pimcore 5, but also cared about the documentation, which had to change due to the transition to the Symfony stack. The documentation will be a work in progress till the final release of Pimcore 5. Just check it out at https://www.pimcore.org/docs/5.0.0

Your help is needed!

Checkout Pimcore 5 on Github today and experience the new Symfony stack. As we are still in early alpha, we need your help and your feedback. Please start to test Pimcore 5 extensively and report bugs as Github issues or provide pull requests. Our transition from Zend to Symfony will just be as good as your testing skills . 

First Questions & Answers

We know that such a big change, the transition of Pimcore’s core architecture to the Symfony framework, raises a lot of questions primarily within the developer community. Within the next half year, until the final launch of Pimcore 5, we will address these questions in detail during gitter chats, webinars, and blog posts - especially for the partner and developer community.

For our first interactive Q&A the Pimcore crew will be available on Gitter chat Friday March 31st, 10:00-11:00am CEST.

But let us kick off this Q&A sessions with answers to the probably 6 most important questions.

#1 When will Pimcore 5 be released officially?
Pimcore 5 will be released officially at the end of September or beginning of October 2017 at this years’ Pimcore Partner Conference in Salzburg, Austria. Until the final release, a couple of alpha and beta versions of Pimcore will be available for testing and also for implementation by brave early adopters.

#2 Can Pimcore 4 projects be updated to Pimcore 5?
An automatic update will not be possible. We want to make the transition between Pimcore 4 projects to Pimcore 5 as seamless as possible. Although there will not be a web-based automatic updater between prior versions and Pimcore 5, the manual work needed is marked down by the compatibility bridge for Pimcore 4 and the inclusion of a Zend view compatible rendering engine. The compatibility bridge, which is realized as a so-called Symfony bundle, comes with the old Zend Framework 1 stack and with the actual bridge that provides the fall back to ZF1 functionalities. If you have been creating Pimcore plugins with a lot of custom functionalities that are based on the Zend Framework, you have to certainly invest more time for the transition, than for converting sites and applications that are only based on Pimcore standards. For details have a look at our documentation.

#3 What is the future of Pimcore 4?
The Zend Framework 1 itself reached its End of Life (EoL) on the 28th of September 2016. Pimcore 4 is the last Pimcore version built on top of the Zend Framework 1 and isn’t going to be actively further developed as soon as Pimcore 5 is released. But of course we’ll provide fixes for critical bugs and security issues for another year (until end of 2018) to give you enough time to migrate your projects to the newest version. Past that point, we will offer custom bug and security fixes for Pimcore 4 on-demand only to users of the Pimcore PEL license and a valid SLA.

#4 What Symfony components are used within Pimcore 5?
Pimcore 5 is a standardized Symfony application based on the latest full stack of Symfony and uses various components like Service Container, Routing, Configuration and Bundles from this leading PHP framework. For views and templates, the default rendering engine will be Symfony’s PHP engine enhanced with some neat functionalities such as an optional Zend\View flavoured syntax that makes Symfony templates just look like Zend views (and makes migration a charm!).

#5 Why Symfony and not Zend Framework 3?
Both the Zend Framework 3 and Symfony 3 are great PHP development frameworks. The recent adoption of Symfony in leading open source applications like Drupal, eZ and Piwik, the great architecture and functionalities and the clear roadmap of it’s development made us choose Symfony. And we are still really glad we have decided that way.

#6 Do I have to train my customers again on the Pimcore 5 interface?
The interface of Pimcore 5 stays the same, besides some cosmetic changes. So you do not have to train your customers again. The big revolution in Pimcore 5 is all under the hood in the core architecture of Pimcore.

So stay tuned...
The Pimcore Crew