## Lithium 0.6: Big Improvements A Brewin'
If you've been keeping up with the timeline for the past three weeks, then you've most likely noticed that there has been a flurry of activity on Lithium as we gear towards a stable release.
For `lithium-0.6`, There are quite a few backwards-incompatible changes to note:
- Created a new top-level namespace, `\lithium\net`, and moved `\lithium\util\Socket`, `\lithium\util\socket\*` and `\lithium\http` under this new namespace.
- Created an application-level bootstrap configuration directory at `\app\config\bootstrap`. This allows you to split up your bootstrap sequence into smaller, more logical chunks, all of which will be loaded automatically.
- Added colors to console output for all platforms that support POSIX-compatible escape characters. Most `li3` console commands (including `test`, which now has red/green test goodness) will output colored text to the command line for highlighting important information.
- Completely revamped template layer. A custom stream class is no longer used for rendering, making the template layer play nice with APC. View templates are now compiled & stored in `app/resources/tmp/cache/templates/`. If you're updating from an older release, make sure this folder path exists on your installation.
- Added some minor caching love to Libraries in `app/config/bootstrap/cache.php` (as a filter, no less).
- Support has been added for detecting the preferred locale from action and console requests.
- G11n environment settings have been introduced allowing for centrally and globally switching the effective locale.
- Several names and signatures of g11n methods changed for a more streamlined API.
- Modified the API for most `Cache` adapters:
- Added multi-key support for Memcache and APC cache adapters (see docs for which methods support this functionality).
- Removed extraneous '\_expires' keys generated on `Cache::write()` calls - no more polluting your cache keyspace.
- Improved docs and tests just about everywhere.
While hacking away on Lithium, we managed to generate a few very useful use-cases for our one-of-a-kind filter system:
- Using [ xhprof](http://pecl.php.net/package/xhprof) for [ profiling](http://pastium.org/view/cc7b5d11ced0c4e2ad8cf25227b0bd96).
- [ Serving up assets](http://pastium.org/view/e6d0c0cc88010822cb58a7fc4b7a6014) (images, stylesheets, etc.) from plugins.
Even with some of the fundamental changes listed above, Lithium is still quite solid at its core, and new features are added almost daily. We're more than halfway to the finish line, and the momentum is only increasing.
* [view the changelog](http://rad-dev.org/lithium/wiki/releases/0_6)
* [download 0.6](http://rad-dev.org/lithium/versions)
Stay tuned with the latest developments on [ Rad-Dev](http://rad-dev.org/lithium), browse around the soon to be updated [ API docs](http://lithify.me/docs), and come say hi on `#li3` and `#li3-core` on `irc.freenode.net`.
~ jperras
