After an overly long development cycle, I’m pleased to introduce the latest release of phpPgAdmin, version 7.12.0.
As with many software releases, the code changes are plenty, and the release bullets are few, but they are quite important. In this release we have:
PHP 7 is now the default version for development, and the minimum version required for phpPgAdmin going forward. Most users are currently running PHP 7, so we’re happy to support this going forward, and encourage users of PHP 5.x to upgrade for continued support.
We’ve added support for all current versions of PostgreSQL, including the pending PostgreSQL 12 release. Our aim going forward will be to ensure that we are properly supporting all current release of Postgres, with degraded support for EOL versions.
We’ve updated some internal libraries, fixed additional bugs, and merged many patches that had accumulated over the years. We want to thank everyone who provided a patch, whether merged or not, and hope you will consider contributing to phpPgAdmin in the future.
This version also comes with a change to our development and release cycle process. When the project originally started, we developed and released new versions like traditional desktop software; annual-ish releases for new versions with all the new features, while providing a few periodic bugfix releases in between. While this was ok from a developers point of view, that meant users had to wait for months (and in unfortunate cases, years) between releases to get new code. As developers, we never felt that pain, because developers would just run code directly from git master. As it turns out, that is a much better experience, and as much of the software world has changed to embrace that idea, our process is going to change as well.
The first part of this is changing how we number our releases. Going forward, our versions numbers will represent:
- the primary PHP version supported (7),
- the most recent version of PostgreSQL supported (12),
- and the particular release number in that series (0).
Our plan is to continue developing on this branch (7_12) and releasing new features and bug fixes as often as needed. At some point about a year from now, after PostgreSQL has branched for Postgres 13/14, we’ll incorporate that into an official release, and bump our release number to 7.13.0. Presumably, in a few years, there will eventually be a release of PHP 8, and we’ll start planning that change at that time. We hope this will make it easier for both users and contributors going forward.
For more information on phpPgAdmin, check out our project page at https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/
You can download the release at: https://github.com/phppgadmin/phppgadmin/releases/tag/REL_7-12-0
Once again, I want to thank everyone who has helped contribute to phpPgAdmin over the years. The project has gone through some ups and downs, but despite that is still used by a very large number of users and it enjoys a healthy developer ecosystem. We hope you find this new release helpful!