I'm proud to announce the 6.3 release of ATK.

It has taken more time than I initially promised (almost a year ago), but hopefully this release will soon be followed by another one (more on that below).

Let's look at some of the highlights for this new release:

Security fix
This release contains an important security fix, which makes it a recommended upgrade to all users.

Improved API documentation
The API documentation has been majorly improved. You can find the API docs for this release at http://www.ibuildings.com/docs/atk/release_6_3_0/.

One-to-many relation now works in addition mode
Using the new AF_ONETOMANY_SHOW_ADD flag it's possible to use the atkOneToManyRelation when you still need to add the master record. The detail records will be temporarily stored in the session until the master record is added. NOTE: this might not work in all cases, but for regular nodes you should not run into troubles.

Better Unicode support
The new atkString class in atk/utils contains a wide range of string methods that work the same as the normal PHP string methods (e.g. strlen, substr etc.) but work properly for Unicode strings too.

MySQL auto-increment support
ATK now fully supports AUTO_INCREMENT columns in MySQL. Previous to this release ATK used a special table (called "db_sequence") to keep track of sequences, but as of this release this table isn't used anymore for columns that have the AUTO_INCREMENT property set in the database. This change should be backwards compatible for normal usage, unless you used the "db_sequence" table yourself too for a table which already had the AUTO_INCREMENT property set!

Save search criteria for re-use
The atkSearchHandler now supports saving search criteria for re-use (just like the atkSmartSearchHandler). You should create an atk_searchcriteria table for this to work, see the atk/skel directory and CHANGES file for more information.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, for a complete list of all changes please have a look at the change log for this release.

The release can be downloaded at http://www.atk-framework.com/download/.

So what about the next release of ATK?
Well we have a massive backlog of patches in the ATK Bugzilla. So what we want to do for the next release is organize a patch night which we will use to add a lot of user contributions to ATK.

We probably don't have time to add all patches to ATK, neither may some patches still be valid or contain features we would like to incorporate into mainstream ATK. So my question to all of you is, what patches (e.g. please specify Bugzilla bug numbers) would you like us to have a look at for the next ATK release?

You can find an overview of patches in the ATK Bugzilla here.

Please specify which bugs you want us to look at in a comment in the following topic: http://forum.achievo.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=78261