Today we released our first beta of the new Neos 9.2 release line.
Thanks to all who contributed <3.
- Bastian Waidelich
- Bernhard Schmitt
- Christian Müller
- Denny Lubitz
- Marc Henry Schultz
- Martin Ficzel
- Michael
- Sebastian Helzle
- Sebastian Kurfürst
- Sophia Grimm
- Theo Salzmann
Recommended for new starting projects on stage
Neos 9.2 will introduce a new schema for the content graph. For new projects in line its worth to consider using this beta with its optimisations to be easier able to upgrade to the Neos 9.2 final release ™.
Setup Neos as usual by cloning the base distribution ~in the 9.2.0-beta1 version~ or adjust your dependencies of your base distribution as shown below.
Minimum PHP 8.4 Requirement
Neos 9.2 and Flow 9.2 raise the minimum PHP version from PHP 8.2 to PHP 8.4.
PHP 8.2 will be dead with security support ending in December 2026 and Neos 9.2 and 9.3 will be maintained well beyond that. PHP 8.4 was released in November 2024.
Guarantees of stability
We are not allowed to break any public PHP API, so the step to the final Neos 9.2 release will not introduce any problems.
Upgrading to this beta requires to remove the graph projection tables and replay. The goal of the final Neos 9.2 after having it tested is that it will contain the same schema and thus no further database adjustment would be needed.
Though if a new discovery during testing shows us that we need to change the schema again we will not refrain from the adjustment. That could require a replay when moving to the next beta or Neos 9.2 stable. This scenario with the extensive tests done so far is quite unlikely.
Migrating back to Neos 9.1 requires to remove the graph projection tables and replay again.
Upgrade instructions from Neos 9.0 and Neos 9.1
In your composer.json you should require 9.2.0-beta1 for all Neos packages from the development distribution and for the Neos Ui as well as Flow:
"neos/flow": "9.2.0-beta1",
"neos/neos": "9.2.0-beta1",
"neos/neos-ui": "9.2.0-beta1"
Also you must allow the beta via
"minimum-stability": "dev",
"prefer-stable": true,
Note that our Jenkins choose not to tag some packages correctly yet.
Due to the proxy changes in this upgrade, please do flush all temporary things;)
rm -rf Data/Temporary
Event migrations
1. Adjust recordedAt and node time stamps to UTC timezone +00:00
See issue
By storing “recordedAt” as datetime field we lost its original timezone information.
But we can make the assumption that its timezone should be the same as the one encoded in the ATOM metadata field “initiatingTimeStamp”
./flow crupgrade:eventsrecordedattoutc
While strictly not required this migration corrects the events to avoid any offset timestamps if you rely on those.
2. Deduplicate race conditioned ChangeBaseWorkspace’s
See issue
Workspace operations, also ChangeBaseWorkspace were not thread safe before the addition of workspace versioning in the read model and thus safe soft constraint checks.
That resulted in the possibility that a single workspace was changed two or more times in parallel by the same user.
Because each ChangeBaseWorkspace can be slow and cleans up at the end the content stream via ContentStreamWasRemoved, that results in possibly multiple illegal ContentStreamWasRemoved events and in total a fully illegal ChangeBaseWorkspace.
./flow crupgrade:eventsdeduplicatebaseworkspacechanges
Schema migrations / replay
The database can be migrated the following way:
A setup to apply the latest schema adjustments:
./flow doctrine:migrate
Normally you would use ./flow cr:setup to adjust also the content repository.
Because of the major change in the content graph, the tables have to not only truncated but dropped before doing the setup and full replay.
- change to introduce new column workspace.version
- change to introduce new column hierarchrelation.contentstreamlayer and id and new table contentstreamlayer
./flow crupgrade:resetupandreplaycontentgraph
For remaining possible projections needing care, run
./flow cr:setup
And inspect via ./flow cr:status how your CR looks like. Everything should be now up to date and active.
Production upgrade
We are working on tooling to allow to continue operating on the current 9.0 / 9.1 content graph while Neos 9.2 is rolled out and to upgrade easier with a lesser or no content-freeze.
There will be this compatibility package neos/contentgraph-doctrinedbaladapter-compatibility which provides the 9.1 content graph compatible made for 9.2
The above upgrade steps require a content freeze and a downtime. The downtime can be reduced when upgrading and replaying first on stage or locally and then switching both database and redeploying the code to production.
Features
1.) 
Highlight Content Stream Layers - Fast publishing
Big concept update which heavily speeds up Neos 9.2+, by removing the full copy of Hierarchy Relations, and replacing it with so-called “hierarchy layers”.
FEATURE: Content graph hierarchy layers / Copy hierarchies on write / Instant forks
- for base implementation and functioning concept (still SLOW on big sites)
FEATURE: Major Performance-improvements in big Sites by Hierarchy-relation Pre-filtering + Declarative Value Object Query-building
- for heavy performance optimizations (tested with > 150k nodes)
FEATURE: Improve MySQL projection performance by more than factor 8
- for heavy performance optimizations with MySQL
With content stream layers a workspace can be created with cost of almost nothing. This is required to speed up our login. Also during publishing or rebase the we heavily profit from fast copying.
If you’re interested in that i recommend to look at my beautiful graphs here.
2.) Highlight Neos Ui Experience
FEATURE: Preview mode indicator for Neos UI
FEATURE: Move workspace selector to primary toolbar
3.) Workspace Role Assignments
FEATURE: Workspace module with role assignments
4.) Flow Framework
FEATURE: Runtime Constructor Injection
This changes constructor injection to happen at runtime by the ObjectManager. That means the constructor no longer needs to be proxied and loose it’s signature (Any other proxying happening, eg. AOP or other injection types will retain the signature now). It therefore also reduces the amount of proxies necessary in a project.
FEATURE: Enable Xdebug Path Mapping in Development context per default
… and many further things
This post does not document all new features as well as bug-fixes but the final release announcement will.