Phinx joins CakePHP!

These are some really good news – Phinx joins CakePHP family!  If you are from a different technology stack and not familiar with these, Phinx is an excellent database migrations tool, which has been used by CakePHP framework for a while now.  The two worked great together.  Now that they are under the same roof, I’m expecting even more goodies!

We are very excited to announce that Phinx has joined the CakePHP team. The Github project has already been moved to the CakePHP organisation. The project itself will stay MIT-licensed but be gradually transformed into a Cake Software Foundation project. Other great news is that the current way to install and update Phinx remains unchanged.

As you are aware, CakePHP has been using Phinx since 3.0.0 for database migrations. The CakePHP Core team welcomes the opportunity to look after and maintain the project and will now start making changes to bring the code in line with the CakePHP (our) coding standards. As well as cleaning up issues and PR’s soon. We will be following up with our plans for the code and setting roadmaps in the coming weeks.

We welcome Phinx to the CakePHP family and hope to see Rob Morgan, Richard Quadling, Woody Gilk around!

Claim to fame : phinx LONGBLOB

My largest claim to fame in the Open Source software just got merged in – a pull request to the phinx project, adding support for MySQL’s LONGBLOB (as well as TINYBLOB and MEDIUMBLOB).  Phinx is the PHP tool for database migrations.  It’s used, among others, by the CakePHP 3 framework.

The patch itself was rather simple and I was surprised that it hasn’t been done by someone else earlier (there was an open issue requesting this for more than a year).  Phinx already had support for BLOB, and for TINYTEXT, MEDIUMTEXT, TEXT, and LONGTEXT.  So practically all I had to do was a bit of copy-paste and find-replace.  Gladly, there were some unit tests in place already, preventing me from breaking a thing or two.

What I found interesting though, wasn’t the patch itself, but the support of the CakePHP community (thank you guys!).   Every few days someone (even core CakePHP developers) would “thumbs up” the pull request to draw the attention of the maintainer to it.  Some people pulled the branch and tested it.  Some wrote comments.  That was awesome and quite inspiring!