Changelog - Phlo

6 August 2026 A raw channel beside the JSON one A Phlo route normally answers in commands: apply() and chunk() speak the JSON protocol that the SPA engine understands. But some responses are not commands. A generated ZIP, a PDF, a CSV export, a line of model output...

3 August 2026 A manual that writes itself Include the manual resource and your app gets a page at /manual describing itself. Nothing to configure.

1 August 2026 A presentation you can steer without a mouse The presentation player got a keymap: space and k to play or pause, left and right to seek, up and down for volume, m for mute, c for captions, f for fullscreen, Home and End for the ends.

29 July 2026 Reaching every screen except your own Broadcasts gained an except, and the daemon's health endpoint began reporting presence per token instead of counting sockets.

29 July 2026 Drag to sort, as an opt-in list view The Phlo CMS gained a sortable list view. One declaration on the model and the rows are draggable:

29 July 2026 A numpad and an on-screen keyboard for touch Two frontend resources arrived for touch screens: DOM/numpad and DOM/keyboard.

29 July 2026 Bind a value once, and let the page keep itself right DOM/store turns a value into something the page follows. Set it in one place and every element bound to it redraws, without a render call and without a framework.

27 July 2026 A point of sale, lifted out of the register that grew it Phlo POS became a product layer of its own: a set of resources that customer apps mount, rather than a codebase each one forks.

27 July 2026 Two connectors from two very different Fridays payments/SumUp and connectors/finance/EBoekhouden joined the connector family, both arriving the way connectors are supposed to: from an app that needed them.

26 July 2026 The web app manifest is now a resource Every installable Phlo app needs a web app manifest, and until this release each one hand-rolled it: a route that sets the content type, encodes the JSON, sets a cache header, plus a link tag in the head.

24 July 2026 One AI interface, whichever engine a node has keys for AI/AI is a facade with auto-detection: an app calls one interface and the node decides which engine answers, based on which credentials it holds.

21 July 2026 The presentation player grew up for its viewers Two weeks after Phlo Presentation could make a film, attention moved from the editor to the person watching it. The player gained the things a video on somebody else's page actually needs.

18 July 2026 Escaping deserved its own delimiter Views gained a third interpolation form: {[ ... ]} outputs its value HTML-escaped.

18 July 2026 Every machine reports its own backups The Phlo Dashboard gained a fleet-wide backup view: one card per node showing when its last run happened and exactly which files moved.

12 July 2026 Sign in with Google, and proof that it is really them security/social sits on top of security/OAuth2 and does one job: build the authorize URL, then turn the callback code into a verified profile. Google, Microsoft and Apple. No user handling, no session, no routes; that...

10 July 2026 Preview equals export, by construction Phlo Presentation plays a presentation in the browser and can render the same thing to an MP4 on the client, with nothing uploaded. The interesting part is why the two look identical.

9 July 2026 Video encoding, harvested from two apps at once DOM/ffmpeg and DOM/recorder landed together: encode a canvas timeline to MP4 in the browser, and capture screen, camera or canvas to a Blob.

2 July 2026 One tick a minute, and the app says what runs Scheduling in Phlo lost its last configuration argument this week. The daemon now ticks every served app once a minute, and what actually runs is declared by the app itself.

2 July 2026 Measuring attention in an app with no page loads The visitors resource counts how long someone actually looked at a page, which is harder than it sounds once the app is a single page.

1 July 2026 A consent banner that translates itself DOM/cookiewall is the GDPR banner, and the interesting part is what it does about language.

29 June 2026 The ORM was portable until PostgreSQL was asked The ORM now runs its full suite against real MySQL and real PostgreSQL in CI, and gained a driver seam where the two genuinely differ.

29 June 2026 A captcha that asks nobody for permission security/captcha is a slider puzzle rendered on your own server: a background image with a gap, a loose piece, and a drag to put it back.

27 June 2026 An audit trail that is one word on the model security/audit records model mutations: who changed what, when, and from what to what. Turning it on for a model is a single static.

27 June 2026 Encrypting the columns that deserve it security/encryption encrypts and decrypts payloads with a key, using authenticated secretbox construction. It is the piece an application reaches for when a column holds something that should be unreadable in a backup.

24 June 2026 Every call in a request, in order, with timings Trace mode instruments the whole app at build time. Turn it on and Phlo writes one JSON dump per request holding every call to a generated method, prop getter, static or native helper, with arguments and timings.

23 June 2026 One way to talk to somebody else's API A connector layer landed: one base class, one credential convention, one result shape, and a dozen services on top of it.

23 June 2026 What changes when the process stops dying Computed statics now clear between requests in worker mode, which is the kind of fix that only becomes necessary once PHP stops behaving the way everyone assumes it does.

22 June 2026 A feature made safe by making it disappear phloeval() evaluates a Phlo statement at runtime. Useful during development, and the interesting part is everything that was done to keep it out of production.

20 June 2026 Markdown parsed where it is typed DOM/markdown parses markdown in the browser. parsemarkdown(src) returns HTML, which makes a live preview a two-line affair.

20 June 2026 A confirmation the server can send on its own DOM/toasts and DOM/dialog give a route two more things it can say. Load them and apply() gains toast: and alert:.

20 June 2026 Nineteen page transitions, one argument Page transitions are resources too. Load one, pass trans: on a view, and the SPA swap animates instead of jumping.

18 June 2026 Three jobs, one wall clock await() runs several app targets at once and returns when the last one finishes, so a route that does three independent things takes as long as the slowest rather than the sum.

18 June 2026 Sending the page updates while the work is still running chunk() is apply() that does not wait. Call it as often as you like during a route and each call reaches the browser immediately, over the response that is still open.

18 June 2026 How a WebSocket server turned into a worker pool The Phlo Daemon exists because of WebSockets, and stopped being about WebSockets within a day.

18 June 2026 Sitemap, robots and hreflang from one resource The seo resource took over the whole search-engine surface of an app: sitemap.xml, robots.txt, the hreflang alternates and the head meta.

17 June 2026 Three charts, no chart library DOM/charts draws sparklines, bar charts and donuts as plain SVG. charts::spark(), charts::bars(), charts::donut(), and nothing arrives from a CDN.

17 June 2026 Four things three apps had each written themselves Charts, invoice XML, Stripe and OAuth2 moved out of the applications and into the engine on the same day.

16 June 2026 Eighteen field types the model already knows about The fields layer turns a model column into a form input, a list cell and a validator at once. Eighteen types ship on one abstract base: text, number, price, date, datetime, bool, email, password, select, multiselect, ...

16 June 2026 Reading a spreadsheet somebody emailed you files/CSV, files/XLSX and files/PDF cover the formats that arrive by mail, and in the case of PDF leave as attachments too.

15 June 2026 Every app can report to the same place notify posts a message to a central hub: one URL, one secret header, one function call. Without a [notify] section in the credentials it does nothing at all.

13 June 2026 The dev panel that mounts itself Set build: true and debug: true and the Phlo Control Center is there at /phlo. No package to install, no route to declare, no configuration.

13 June 2026 Thirty-one themes, one set of variables Themes became resources. List one in data/app.json and its palette ships with the app; there are thirty-one of them now.

11 June 2026 A database manager inside the dashboard The Phlo Dashboard gained dbadmin: browse tables, inspect structure, edit rows, run SQL, import and export. MySQL with a per-session login, and SQLite straight from data/.

11 June 2026 From nothing to a built app, in one command install.php asks a handful of questions and leaves you with an app that builds. There is also a Docker image, so the answer to "what do I need first" can be nothing at all.

11 June 2026 A translation file that is read like an index, not a document The lang resource stopped parsing its entire INI file to answer one lookup and started doing a binary search over a sorted one.

1 June 2026 A WhatsApp number as an ordinary route Phlo WhatsApp is a gateway process that puts a WhatsApp number behind a normal Phlo route. Inbound messages arrive at a webhook, outbound go through a local bridge.

29 May 2026 Loading Composer without loading Composer Phlo no longer requires vendor/autoload.php at boot. It registers a thin wrapper instead, and Composer is pulled in only when a class miss actually needs it.

24 May 2026 An ORM that does not need a database DB/JSONDB lets a model run on a plain JSON file. One model, one table, one file, and the rest of the ORM does not notice.

23 May 2026 The oldest code in Phlo is a list of words Open phlo.php and the first thing after the version is a block of twenty-two constants naming the characters you type all day: br, bs, bt, colon, comma, cr, dash, dot, dq, eq, lf, nl, perc, pipe, qm, semi, slash, spac...

23 May 2026 From modules to resources, and why the word changes The engine directory is classes/, functions.php and resources/. Two of those three names are inherited; the third is chosen.

11 April 2026 One function, one file The fifty-six helper functions that lived at the bottom of the engine file each get a file of their own. first.php is two lines:

11 April 2026 Rules on paper, for whoever writes the language next A skills directory arrives: a working instruction and a canonical ruleset, written as short imperatives that a person or a model can follow without prior knowledge of the project.

20 February 2026 The CMS moves out and Phlo becomes installable Two things land together: the CMS splits into a package of its own, and the engine gains Composer support. That pairing is the point where Phlo stops being one codebase and starts being a platform.

15 February 2026 Twenty-four libraries and thirty-one functions The engine's reusable parts live in two directories. libs/ holds twenty-four of them, the substantial things: AI, DB, DOM, CSS, Fields, Files, Loaders. functions/ holds thirty-one, the small ones: a helper here, a for...

11 January 2026 A CMS written in the language it serves The CMS is 140 files now, and the interesting thing about them is that none of them are special. Thirteen modules, a large set of themes, nineteen page transitions and five dashboard widgets, all ordinary .phlo with t...

11 January 2026 Eight demos, eight files A demos directory arrives with eight self-contained examples, each one file: an SPA, a form with upload, a confirmation dialog, a scroll trigger, a countdown, translations, nested CSS and a live CSS variable. The larg...

11 January 2026 The reasoning gets written down A guide of about sixty-five kilobytes now sits beside the engine: seven chapters covering installation, configuration, routing, views, CSS and the frontend, each closing on its own best practices.

25 December 2025 The dev tools move into the engine The development dashboard and the browser IDE are no longer libraries your app builds. They are part of the engine.

18 September 2025 Four files, one engine, and a release mode The engine is now four files with clear borders: the runtime, the build, the CSS compiler and the debug layer.

18 September 2025 The language starts explaining itself Two files now sit beside the engine that between them describe the whole language: a prose specification of about two and a half kilobytes, and a JSON index with a description of every runtime function.

18 July 2025 A CMS whose whole API is three functions The CMS moves into a package of its own with its own source path, and gets smaller doing it. The public interface is three functions: main() wraps a page in the layout, CMS() renders a model as a list, a record or a f...

18 July 2025 Every file starts by saying what it is A small metadata block arrives at the top of each .phlo file:

18 July 2025 The first layer that lives outside a request Everything so far happens inside an HTTP request. This is where that stops being the only shape: a WebSocket server that keeps connections open and calls the app when something arrives.

18 July 2025 Views learn to think A view has been a string with holes in it: HTML, variables, nothing else. Conditionals and loops meant leaving the view and assembling markup in a method. Now the control structures are part of the language, written a...

18 July 2025 WhatsApp in eleven lines A gateway process turns WhatsApp into HTTP in both directions, and the entire app-side library fits on a page:

3 November 2023 There is no build command A transpiler should be invisible. There is no watcher to start and no command to remember: the engine compares the modification times of your sources against the built app and rebuilds only when something is newer.

3 November 2023 Production is a single file you copy Deploying an app means writing one PHP file to a server. Not a directory, not a pipeline, not a framework alongside it. One file.

3 November 2023 Seven regular expressions are the whole grammar The transpiler that turns .phlo into PHP has a grammar of seven regular expressions. One per keyword, tried in order: handle, function, route, method, prop, view, and the <script> or <style> block.

3 November 2023 The server names what changes The frontend runs on an agreement of eight words. The server answers with JSON naming inner, outer, before, after, remove, main, uri and title; the browser carries them out in the order they arrive, inside a view tran...

18 September 2023 The first .phlo files, and four words to build on Eight files, 273 lines. Not an application: a language being tried out, with four declarations doing all the work.

31 January 2023 A schema that describes its own admin The framework running here has an idea in it worth keeping: the ORM does not read a configuration file, it reads the database.

10 October 2022 Phlo does not start on a blank page Work on Phlo as a language of its own starts today. It starts with something already running.