🚨 Major announcements
Bolt 3 EOL, Bolt 4.2 & 5.0 releases
Hi there, Bolt community ☕️
Over the past year, we have seen very good adoption rates of Bolt 4 and an increasing number of contributions to the Bolt codebase. Thank you for your continuing support of open source!
Our hard work as a community over this time has paid off, we are now able to launch a new major version: Bolt 5. The core team has worked hard to ensure a smooth and easy transition from Bolt 4 to Bolt 5: it will not take you more than 15 minutes per website.
With this come several important announcements for the Bolt community.
How are we making these release decisions?
It is important to us for the community to understand that the end of life and release decisions have not been taken arbitrarily. In considering these announcements, the Core team has taken the following into consideration:
- Bolt releases follow generally established practices of Semantic Versioning. In short, we aim to ensure that regular updates do not contain breaking changes. When breaking changes are necessary to introduce new features, we postpone them until a major release.
- The official Symfony Releases Calendar establishes the timelines for Symfony versions, upon which all Symfony-based projects such as Bolt depend. Adhering to it ensures Bolt as an application remains secure.
- The official PHP Supported Versions calendar announces the timelines for PHP versions and guides the PHP community through major upgrades of the programming language. Likewise, as a PHP application Bolt is bound by these announcements.
End of Life for Bolt 3
Bolt 3 was first released over 5 years ago, on 10 May 2016. During this time, the fundamental components that underpin it, such as Silex and Symfony, have received a number of major upgrades and have dropped security updates for older versions. Since security, speed and maintainability are all key components of delivering a stable CMS, the time has come to turn our eyes to adoption of the newer technologies that the more recent versions of Bolt have adapted to.
Bolt 3 will receive security updates until 31 December 2021. After that, it will continue to work and function as it has so far, but will no longer receive any maintenance, bug fixes or security updates.
End of Life for Bolt 4
We will continue to maintain Bolt 4 and provide bug fixes and security updates, guided by the official Symfony Releases Calendar and the PHP Supported Versions calendar. The end-of-life decisions for Bolt are based upon both Symfony and PHP in order to guarantee Bolt moves at the same pace as the PHP community as a whole.
Bolt 4 bug fixes will be provided until 31 December 2022. Security updates will be available until the end of support for Symfony 5, which is November 2023.
Announcing releases of Bolt 4.2 and 5.0
In order to guarantee a smooth upgrade path from Bolt 4 to Bolt 5, we will make an intermediary 4.2 release.
Bolt 4.2 will be released on 27 July 2021
4.2 will work and function just like the latest 4.1.x release at the time, it contains no breaking changes. However, it will allow you to make the few adaptations that are necessary to upgrade to Bolt 5. The first draft of the Bolt 5 update instructions are available on our GitHub Repository.
Bolt 5.0 will be released on 30th August 2021
5.0 will contain a number of new features and improvements announced earlier, including PHP 8.0 support. The Bolt 5 update instructions will assist you in making a smooth transition for your and your clients' websites. Should you choose not to upgrade at this moment, you can rest assured that Bolt 4 will continue to work and continue to be supported according to the announcements above.
Thank you for your contributions and participation of the Bolt project. Onward to a new phase, happy building 🛠