January has been an intense and exciting month for Leaf! After wrapping up 2024 with major improvements, we entered 2025 ready to ship faster, build smarter, and push Leaf to new heights.
We kicked off the year with the first alpha release of Leaf MVC 4.0, marking a significant step toward a more modular, automated, and developer-friendly framework.
📅 Release Timeline:
We will be releasing a few more patches for testing, and then we'll quickly move to our beta release. We're excited about the feedback we've received so far, and we can't wait to see what you build with Leaf MVC 4.0! You can check out the Leaf MVC 4.0 Alpha release notes to get started.
Why you’ll love it:
Many of these changes have been backported to Leaf MVC 3, ensuring stability while making v4 a seamless upgrade.
Faster, easier, and more powerful—January was all about turbocharging your Leaf experience.
This month, we laid the groundwork for:
Most of these will be completed and launched next month, so stay tuned!
Security is a top priority this year, and we’ve started working to improve Leaf’s security and reliability. In January, we closed up tiny gaps in things like authentication and encryption by moving potentially vulnerable code right into modules so Leaf can handle them better. This means less work for you while keeping your apps even more secure. Over the next few months, we will be releasing more security improvements, including:
Paperplane is a new kit for Leaf MVC 4 for people who want to build and ship faster.
🎁 Leaf Zero (Free Forever):
Coming soon in February. Stay tuned!
Long story short: we're breaking up with Symfony Console. Meet Sprout, a minimal, fast, and easy-to-use console app framework.
Here are some key features of Sprout:
We are hoping to release Leaf Sprout in February, so the next Leaf CLI version will be fully based on Leaf Sprout. You can follow our progress on the Leaf Sprout GitHub repository.
We kept the momentum going with our weekly YouTube hangouts, where we discussed upcoming features, improvements, and answered community questions. January’s sessions included:
Deep Dive: Leaf MVC Simplification Roadmap
Answering Your Whys – The Philosophy Behind Leaf
What’s Cooking in Leaf PHP? Sneak Peeks & Announcements
If you missed any of them, catch the replays on our YouTube Channel! We have our final hangout of the month tomorrow, so don't miss it! Since it's the last day of the month, we're doing something a bit different. We'll be going to war with Laravel, Symfony, and other frameworks to see how Leaf stacks up against them.
📺 Watch the Drama Unfold (Popcorn recommended)
Here are some other random highlights from January:
Now for the exciting part—what’s coming next in February! Our February is packed with new releases, updates, and exciting announcements, including:
Leaf MVC 4.0 Beta: Refining the alpha release with bug fixes and additional features.
Release of Paperplane: A new quick-start for Leaf MVC 4 to help you build and ship faster.
Release of Leaf Zero: A free UI kit for Leaf & Leaf MVC to speed up development.
Leaf Sprout: A new console module for Leaf CLI and Leaf MVC 4.
Release of Leaf Billing with Stripe & PayStack: New integrations for Leaf & Leaf MVC.
More Documentation & Tutorials: Helping developers transition seamlessly to Leaf especially from other frameworks.
On top of these new releases, we’ll continue to improve Leaf’s performance, security, and developer experience. We’re also planning to host our second ever Leaf event in 2025, so stay tuned for more details on that!
January has set the tone for an incredible year ahead and none of that would be possible without the amazing Leaf community—your support, feedback, and enthusiasm keep us going! 🎉
Stay tuned for more updates, and let’s keep building together!
💬 Join the party: GitHub | Discord | Twitter
🚀 Follow us for real-time updates: YouTube | Website
