Announcing alpha 1 of SilverStripe 4.0

Alpha 1 of SilverStripe 4.0. It's going to be great!

There's still a lot to do before 4.0 stable, but our first alpha release packs a huge number of changes and features that we think you'll love. As it's an early release, you should expect some bugs and rough edges, but bugs are a kind of feature, right?

4.0 alpha 1 has been released from our master development branch, which has been worked on by us and the rest of the community over a year, and is almost as eagerly awaited as the next SilverStripe book. A lot of the features and new toys have been covered in the earlier blog post, so if this is the first you've heard or our alpha 1 release, we'd invite you to go read it.

What to expect

We aren't in Kansas anymore Toto. This isn't a standard release, and we would not recommend it for any production sites! We, of course, endeavour to release all code in as bug-free a state as possible, but what we would really like is your assistance: it's time for the hecklers, the naysayers, the evangelists and fanatics to give this release a try. Tell us what goes wrong, which things break, and how spectacularly they break.

We invite you to raise issues on our github issue tracker, and even more invitingly invite you to raise pull requests (where you feel you know better than us) on our github pull requests.

Getting the release

To get a fresh copy of the alpha to test out, you can create a new project with the following composer command.

composer create-project silverstripe/installer /path/to/project 4.0.0-alpha1

Or head over to the pre-release downloads to grab the files via zip or tar.