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January Recap: Big Moves & Bigger Plans!
January wasn’t just a month—it was a launchpad. We kicked off 2025 with a bang, making big moves and setting the stage for even bigger plans ahead. We've got only one day left in January, so it's a perfect time to go through the month and see how we did against our goals.
2025 Roadmap
We published our 2025 roadmap at the beginning of the year, and you can read the full post if you haven't already seen it. In summary, we planned to release Leaf MVC v4, work on integrations with popular services, add tools to help you build and ship faster, improve security and reliability, improve the documentation, and generally build a more community-driven project.
January has been an intense and exciting month for Leaf! After wrapping up 2024 with major improvements, we entered 2025 ready to ship faster, build smarter, and push Leaf to new heights.
🌟 Leaf MVC 4.0 Alpha: The Future is Modular
We kicked off the year with the first alpha release of Leaf MVC 4.0, marking a significant step toward a more modular, automated, and developer-friendly framework.
📅 Release Timeline:
- Alpha: January 15, 2025 (Released 🎉)
- Beta: January 24, 2025 (Delayed - Jan 31 🎉)
- RC: January 31, 2025 (Delayed - Feb 7 🎉)
- Stable: February 10, 2025 (Delayed)
We will be releasing a few more patches for testing, and then we'll quickly move to our beta release. We're excited about the feedback we've received so far, and we can't wait to see what you build with Leaf MVC 4.0! You can check out the Leaf MVC 4.0 Alpha release notes to get started.
Why you’ll love it:
- A more flexible, modular structure like a bunch of legos
- Automated features to speed up development which means less time on config and more time on building
- Enhanced view engine & routing system on steroids
- Improved database handling for better performance
Many of these changes have been backported to Leaf MVC 3, ensuring stability while making v4 a seamless upgrade.
⚡ January's Power-Ups
Faster, easier, and more powerful—January was all about turbocharging your Leaf experience.
This month, we laid the groundwork for:
- New integrations with popular services like Stripe, and PayStack (Coming soon in February)
- A new unified database layer using Schema files
- Better automated frontend tooling for faster UI development
- Better performance and security enhancements
- Paperplane kit for Leaf MVC 4 (Pre-order now for 50% off)
- Leaf Zero - Free UI components, page sections, and templates for Leaf MVC 4 (Coming soon in February)
Most of these will be completed and launched next month, so stay tuned!
🛡️ Security & Reliability Improvements
Security is a top priority this year, and we’ve started working to improve Leaf’s security and reliability. In January, we closed up tiny gaps in things like authentication and encryption by moving potentially vulnerable code right into modules so Leaf can handle them better. This means less work for you while keeping your apps even more secure. Over the next few months, we will be releasing more security improvements, including:
- Rate limiting
- Content security policy for better security defaults
- Guides on setting up more secure infrastructure
🛩️ Paperplane & Leaf Zero
Paperplane is a new kit for Leaf MVC 4 for people who want to build and ship faster.
- Launch SaaS apps faster than you can say “unicorn startup.”
- Early access to Leaf Zero sections, components, and templates + example applications
- Includes Stripe/PayStack billing, SEO tools, and pre-built auth—50% off if you act fast! 👉 Pre-Order Here (Offer expires when we hit 50 signups!)
🎁 Leaf Zero (Free Forever):
- Free, beautiful UI components? Check.
- Page templates? Check.
- Your excuse for slow development? Deleted.
Coming soon in February. Stay tuned!
🌱 Introducing Leaf Sprout: Bye-Bye Symfony Console
Long story short: we're breaking up with Symfony Console. Meet Sprout, a minimal, fast, and easy-to-use console app framework.
Here are some key features of Sprout:
- Dependency-free, not based on any Laravel or Symfony components which means it will work on PHP v7.2+ (Yes, even your grandma’s server)
- First-class support for Leaf & Leaf modules
- Comes with built in styling, input handling, output handling, and more
- Easy to use, easy to extend
- Extensive support for composer and npm processed/scripts
We are hoping to release Leaf Sprout in February, so the next Leaf CLI version will be fully based on Leaf Sprout. You can follow our progress on the Leaf Sprout GitHub repository.
🎥 Leaf Hangouts & Community Growth
We kept the momentum going with our weekly YouTube hangouts, where we discussed upcoming features, improvements, and answered community questions. January’s sessions included:
Deep Dive: Leaf MVC Simplification Roadmap
Answering Your Whys – The Philosophy Behind Leaf
What’s Cooking in Leaf PHP? Sneak Peeks & Announcements
If you missed any of them, catch the replays on our YouTube Channel! We have our final hangout of the month tomorrow, so don't miss it! Since it's the last day of the month, we're doing something a bit different. We'll be going to war with Laravel, Symfony, and other frameworks to see how Leaf stacks up against them.
📺 Watch the Drama Unfold (Popcorn recommended)
🎉 Other Highlights from January
Here are some other random highlights from January:
- Auth got user verification built in
- Router updates for performance and usability
- Mail, FS, HTTP, and other modules got tons of small updates
- Support for Tailwind v4 was completed in CLI
- Blade got tons of new directives and updates
- Leaf CLI got an update that syncs commands to Leaf MVC CLI
- Leaf DB got support for deferred connections out of the box
- Leaf Server got support for concurrent PHP & Vite servers
- Leaf hit a new high of monthly downloads on composer
- We got 2 new sponsors on Open Collective (Thank you Axiojet and Kunule!)
- We hit a new high of monthly views on YouTube
🔥 What’s Next in February?
Now for the exciting part—what’s coming next in February! Our February is packed with new releases, updates, and exciting announcements, including:
Leaf MVC 4.0 Beta: Refining the alpha release with bug fixes and additional features.
Release of Paperplane: A new quick-start for Leaf MVC 4 to help you build and ship faster.
Release of Leaf Zero: A free UI kit for Leaf & Leaf MVC to speed up development.
Leaf Sprout: A new console module for Leaf CLI and Leaf MVC 4.
Release of Leaf Billing with Stripe & PayStack: New integrations for Leaf & Leaf MVC.
More Documentation & Tutorials: Helping developers transition seamlessly to Leaf especially from other frameworks.
On top of these new releases, we’ll continue to improve Leaf’s performance, security, and developer experience. We’re also planning to host our second ever Leaf event in 2025, so stay tuned for more details on that!
🙌 You made this happen!
January has set the tone for an incredible year ahead and none of that would be possible without the amazing Leaf community—your support, feedback, and enthusiasm keep us going! 🎉
Stay tuned for more updates, and let’s keep building together!
- Authors
- Name
- Michael Darko
- @mychidarko