Monthly roundup

Latest Updates

SuiteCRM 8.5

We are in the final phase of testing the next feature release, SuiteCRM 8.5 and will aim to have this available week beginning 11th December. In this release we will be upgrading Angular to version 16, introducing quick filters and improving performance when logging into the application.

Symfony 5.4 LTS

We had intended to also upgrade Symfony to 5.4 LTS from 5.2, but have chosen to postpone this, in favour of upgrading and moving to Symfony 6.4. A note from the team, will give you an insight into why this decision was made:

Symfony is a great framework and SuiteCRM uses it quite extensively, with several extensions to the framework itself. In versions 5.3 and 5.4 of Symfony there were some great features released which brought the framework to new web standards. However these also have high impact on the setup we use within SuiteCRM. These new features include:

  • New symfony-runtime. From the Symfony docs site “The Runtime Component decouples the bootstrapping logic from any global state to make sure the application can run with runtimes like PHP-PM, ReactPHP, Swoole, etc. without any changes.”, which is a great step forward on to supporting new php setups
  • Several changes to the Symfony Security component, for example the change from `IS_AUTHENTICATED_ANONYMOUSLY` to `PUBLIC_ACCESS`, which would mean updates to login throttling, updates to the SAML bundle, etc
  • API Platform 3.x released and deprecation of version 2.7. Symfony 5.4 only supports API Platform until 2.x, version 3.x is only supported with Symfony 6.x

Another key factor to the decision of postponing the upgrade to 5.4 is that the new Symfony 6.4 LTS version is scheduled to be released in the coming days . With end of support for bug fixes on November 2026 and end of support for security fixes on November 2027.

With all this in mind and knowing that Symfony is a key base of SuiteCRM we’ve decided to jump directly to Symfony 6.4 and will stay on the LTS path, upgrading when new Symfony LTS versions are released. We are actively working on the upgrade to 6.3 and will update to 6.4 when it is released.

Security Issues Reporting

Following huntr.dev’s recent announcement, they will no longer be supporting all open source projects and will now only be accepting vulnerability reporting for AI/ML applications.

As such we have chosen to switch to the GitHub Security Advisory service for security reporting and publishing of advisories. You can find this in the respective repos, under the security tab and we will be updating our documentation to align with this change in due course.

New SuiteCRM 8 YouTube Video

We have added another new video to our YouTube channel in support of the new SuiteCRM 8 focused Developer Masterclass series. The new series gives a great introduction for any developer who wants to get to know more about working with SuiteCRM 8. If you want to find out more about the new Masterclass Series you can go here.

Otherwise, this month’s YouTube video is a snippet from the new series showing you how to customise the menu bar in SuiteCRM 8, which you will find here or watch below

What’s Next?

SuiteCRM 8.6

With 8.5 in final testing, the development team have now turned their focus to SuiteCRM 8.6. The first area we are looking at is Usability and how we can make it easier for users to locate recently viewed records and navigate between records. Therefore we will be adding a ‘Global Recently Viewed’ icon onto the navigation bar which will list the recently viewed records across all modules.

We are also including a ‘Back’ button when viewing a record, which will keep track of the user’s journey when viewing records. This ‘Back’ button will then make it easier to go back, one record at a time, to get back to the original record if required.

Maintenance Release

Our next maintenance release has been scheduled for week beginning 15th January 2024, where there will be a number of important fixes as well as several PRs. More information on this release will be available nearer to the time.

For more information on future releases, please check the Roadmap.