Discussion Forum

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 978

BigTree 4.0 beta 5 backwards compatibility breaks.

With the release of beta 5 we're looking forward to release candidates and a feature freeze to knock out remaining bugs. We were also looking forward and saw issues with using a lot of variables with common names in the global namespace that could easily be overwritten by required includes or templates.

The biggest backwards compatibility breaks are the following issues:

1. $layout no longer controls what layout is loaded from /templates/layouts -- this is now set in $bigtree["layout"]

2. $content no longer contains your template's outputted code in your layout files -- this now is set in $bigtree["content"]

3. /site/index.php has been changed considerably and must be updated - if you are upgrading over an existing project.

4. $config is now $bigtree["config"]. BigTree will still use your $config variable from /templates/config.php but it is no longer addressable as $config from within the BigTree environment.

The example site now advocates for the use of the defined versions of the other global variables (WWW_ROOT vs $www_root, for example). Other previously global-only variables are now available in the $bigtree global array, but continue to remain available in the global scope.

To perform a database update for beta 5's new features, please hit your admin's dashboard after replacing the /core/ folder of your beta 4 installation.
I would like to emphasize that the decision to break backwards compatibility at this point was not taken lightly and there will be no backwards compatibility breaks from the official 4.0 release until 5.0 at the earliest (which will be a year and a half out from the official 4.0 release).