We started in May with the words "still there is a lot of work to do" and that was no exaggeration. By now though we have refined the set of features we want to ship.
As to be expected we did find a bunch of bugs and concepts that needed rework throughout the beta phase. But with a growing team around Neos 9 and a couple of early adopters we are well on track. A hearty thank you to the early adopters that provided us with reports, data, and bugfixes throughout our beta phase.
At this point we also have a couple of live websites running on the Neos 9 beta proving that we are close to the release. Our weekly meetings have grown in size as more team members tackle Neos 9 issues and therefore progress is made rapidly.
We will still not tag the final release this year anymore. Instead the team continues to provide betas and we expect another one in December. If nothing major is found we would like to ship the final release in the beginning of the new year.
In comparison to our previous blog post we are adapting the overall plan for the releases and will release 9.0 before Flow and Neos 8.4 and then provide these afterwards with some backported code and forward compatibility features to ease your updates.
At this point we would also like to point out some considerations which projects might be good candidates to start on 9.0 and which might at this point still be better suited for version 8.x.
First of all we will not be shipping PostgreSQL support with 9.0. The complexity of writing a well performing adapter for it is too high, so the current state of that part of the code is not ready for production. We will obviously finish this for one of the next feature releases of Neos, but if you absolutely rely on PostgreSQL you should wait for that.
We also carefully limited the extension points within the new ContentRepository and a lot of the classes are marked as internal for now.
Given that these APIs are all new we would like to see them more "in the wild" to provide you with safe and useful extension points based on these experiences. We will rely on your feedback where extension points would be expected.
For upgrading projects we have a lot of support in place, specifically:
- convert existing nodes to Neos 9 events
- rector based code migrations to make your code (and Fusion) compatible or at least help you change your code to be compatible
- core set of packages ready for Neos 9
That said, we encountered a couple scenarios were Nodes were hard to migrate to the somewhat stricter Neos 9 structures, also the code migrations only go so far. So an upgrade for an older and bigger project might not be easy, we would suggest for you to wait a bit and migrate to 8.4 first when it is out. We encourage you to migrate smaller projects though.
We already have a some of our additional packages ready for Neos 9, and the community also has some well known packages updated as well as a new lightweight elastic search implementation.
To conclude:
- Neos 9.0 final release beginning of 2025
- Neos/Flow 8.4 release next after that
While we continue to work on Neos we will leave you with the happiest holiday greetings for this season and a happy new year.