Very pleased to announce the next much-needed release of the framework: version 4.2.0! This brings a ton of updates and new features, which you should definitely go read about right now

A few things I want to highlight:

• The minimum PHP version has been increased to 7.4. Composer should ignore this version for 7.3 environments, but be careful not to do a manual update if you haven't migrated yet!
• There are a number of breaking changes that you should review for relevancy to your projects, but this one applies to everybody:

The CodeIgniter\CodeIgniter class has a new property $context and it must have the correct context at runtime. So the following files have been changed: public/index.php, spark

• (You must update those files for your project to work; read the release notes for more details!)
• Lots of enhancements but two new component classes to highlight, first the "Improved Auto Routing" (opt-in) brings a more secure alternative to the traditional way of mapping URLs to routes
• ... and the long-awaited OCI8 driver for Oracle databases, supporting SQL and PL/SQL statements
• And, just because it amounts to so much: hundreds of bugs fixed and small improvements (three months worth)

With this release we hope to be back on a regular monthly-ish release cycle for bugfix patches. Planned for the next minor release will be the refactored version of the Email class, and more.

While I have you, be sure to check out our updated list of official packages that has been growing quietly.

This includes the just-released Shield for authentication and authorization.

As always a GIANT shoutout to the team who has volunteered countless hours of code contributions and numerous more behind-the-scenes conversations and planning to make this happen.

And always, thanks to all the contributors and supporters (that's YOU!) from the community! Code on.

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