You’re looking at a screenshot of the new design for the Trongate website. Hopefully, this will be going up within the next ten days or so. Perhaps it’s already up by the time you read this.

Our new design is darker and much less wordy than our original ‘blue’ design. We’ve also ditched the ‘Particles JS’ effect that has been on the homepage since day one. The Particles JS effect was super cool when it first came out, however, it’s starting to look a little bit dated at this stage.

In truth, the current re-design is more of a new skin than a complete redesign. We’ll be keeping most of the website content unchanged. The main changes we’re making are to do with the colours that we’re using and the text that you see on our homepage.

Having a look at the homepage with a fresh pair of eyes has allowed an opportunity to re-consider some of the language that we’ve used and how we’ve positioned the framework, generally.

We’re lucky because we happen to have a framework that demolishes the competition based on every metric known to humanity.

Trongate developers have the luxury of being able to brag about having; an incredibly fast PHP framework (probably the fastest!), a framework with an astonishingly small footprint, the only framework that comes with a free graphical query builder, the only popular PHP framework that uses no third-party libraries, the only PHP framework that offers a credible alternative to Packagist… and the list goes on.

These things are all good and I’m sure some of them might be up for debate. However, there’s no question about what Trongate’s flagship feature is.

It’s stability.

So, if there’s one thing that developers should know about Trongate it’s that the makers of Trongate are committed to stability more-so than any other framework anywhere. Trongate was built to last and if all goes according to plan there will never be a Trongate version 2.

If there’s another framework with the same selling point as Trongate then I haven’t heard of it!

Being in this unique position has allowed us to adopt a rather striking catchphrase - one that has been proudly displayed on our homepage for rather a long time:

“Trongate is v1 forever”

It’s a phrase that has attracted some attention. Hopefully, it has helped developers to get a clear understanding of what Trongate stands for. Unfortunately, however, it’s a phrase that has been grossly misinterpreted and perhaps even misunderstood.

Trongate has a lot of friends but it should come as no surprise that we have a few naysayers too. The reason why this should not be a surprise is because Trongate represents a 180 degree change of direction for PHP developers. Quite frankly, it’s a framework for people who disagree with the status quo - a framework for the rule-breakers and the renegades.

One of the things that is abundantly obvious at this stage is that the Trongate naysayers have a dirty little trick up their sleeves. The dirty little trick is to dispense with nuance.

When they see, ‘v1 forever’, on the website, you’ll never hear them respond with, “Now, there’s an interesting concept!”. You’ll certainly never hear the naysayers asking, “How is that even possible?”. Instead it’s much easier for them to say, “Trongate never gets updated”.

Of course, a short trip to GitHub will confirm that Trongate gets updated constantly. It’s almost certainly one of the most active and worked-on frameworks on Earth. I have personally worked on Trongate full-time for over three and a half years!

But instead of taking that on board, one or two naysayers have taken it upon themselves to dish out the utterly intellectually bankrupt declaration that “Trongate never gets updated”.

They know fine well what they’re doing! They are deliberately misleading and misrepresenting Trongate because they can’t come to terms with the fact that everything they’ve been using is bloated and lacking in stability.

From a versioning perspective, nothing has changed.

Trongate remains committed to the ‘v1 forever’ policy as strongly as ever.

Trongate’s v1 forever slogan (if we may call it that) was our way of saying that we are really committed to never breaking the framework. It always came with the disclaimer that we cannot guarantee v1 forever - however - we will certainly try our very best to keep Trongate on version one indefinitely. Nothing has changed in that regard, and please forgive my repetition.

We don’t want a version two. We have no plans to release version two, ever. We want Trongate to be v1 forever. It’s our highest priority. I say this to you as strongly and as forcefully as the English language will allow.

Sadly, given the ‘dirty little tricks’ that we’ve been getting from a small number of naysayers along with some recent developments with the PHP Foundation - ‘v1 forever’ seems to have evolved into something that has the potential to be twisted and perhaps even turned against us.

In a recent news article, I discussed at length why I am deeply disappointed with some of the developments with the PHP Foundation. Since writing that article, I can confirm the following:


  1. Outwith the Trongate community, virtually nobody paid attention! Once again - Trongate represents the lone voice of rational dissent.

  2. I stand by my original article and - very sadly - the PHP Foundation appears to be determined to break PHP.

  3. Whilst Trongate has been affected by these developments, so far, we’ve managed to keep on top of everything that’s being thrown at us.

  4. However, Team Trongate is far less optimistic about what's in store for other segments of the PHP community - particularly the communities of Wordpress and Laravel.

  5. As things stand, millions of sites are soon going to be broken and it’s a disaster for PHP.

  6. We're not saying that something bad will happen "some day in the future". On the contrary, we're crystal clear about when the poodoo will hit the fan. We reckon that the release of PHP 8.3 will be when it all kicks off. We've looked at what's coming up and that's our prediction.

  7. We don’t want this to happen and we stand ready to support those other communities when ‘the tsunami’ arrives.

  8. The vast majority of PHP developers have no clue about how bad things are about to get!

  9. Interestingly, the guardians of Python have recently started rolling out breaking changes too! This appears to be an industry-wide problem!



  10. Unless the PHP Foundation changes their behaviour and stops breaking PHP, Trongate - like many other PHP frameworks - will remain perpetually on ‘fire-fighting’ mode. This means that we’re expecting the PHP Foundation to roll out lots more breaking changes. It’s now the job of Team Trongate to find workarounds for those breaking changes - as and when they happen. This is not easy work. It’s not fun. It’s something that we don’t want. Nevertheless, this appears to be our new norm - thanks to the PHP Foundation.

    All things considered, it’s probably right to reassure all Trongate developers that we haven’t changed. Stability remains our highest value and ‘v1 forever’ represents The Promise Land for Trongate.

    Nevertheless, as we prepare to roll up our sleeves and enter into this new phase of perpetual fire-fighting (i.e., fixing breaking changes that are being rolled out by the PHP Foundation), it’s probably best that we retire the phrase, ‘v1 forever’. At least, for now.

    I'll leave you with a link to the 'PHP RCF' page. From here, you'll see a comprehensive list of all of the changes that are currently being considered for PHP. There's no question that some of the changes will be welcomed by some PHP developers. What's alarming is the apparently inexhaustible supply of proposals for breaking changes. For PHP, and perhaps web development in general, a dark stormcloud is approaching:

    https://wiki.php.net/rfc

    Happy coding,

    DC