7x Releases Exponential Platform Legacy 2.5.0.2
Saturday 18 April 2026 7:45:16 pm
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Rebooting our free software community software distribution of this Very Powerful Symfony CMS Framework with Full Legacy Bridge Support!
7x is happy to announce that we are now releasing the newly rebranded and improved Exponential Platform Legacy 2.5.0.2 (Based upon eZ Platform 2.5 + Legacy Bundle) available now for download, installation, upgrade.
This release is our third as Exponential Platform Legacy. The software is exactly the same as before as you expect it to be, with a simple text change to the software to replace the product name and remove the trademarked term.
Upgrade process for existing installations has not changed at all. New installations work as expected. Freedom for the Exponential Community is retained and stable for general use! No slowdowns here, full speed ahead! Try out the new features today by downloading the software package now available (tar.gz or zip)!
Exponential Platform Legacy v2.5.0.2 Released — Full Theme Chain, SQLite Installer, and Kernel Fixes
April 10, 2026 — 7x (se7enxweb), North American stewards of Exponential Platform
We are pleased to announce the official stable release of Exponential Platform Legacy 2.5.0.2 (GPL Stable). This release marks the first fully installable, bootable, and renderable state of the 2.5.x branch on PHP 8.3 and delivers a complete multi-theme design chain, a SQLite-based local development installer, critical kernel fixes for composite primary key handling, PHPUnit modernization, and corrected seed data across both MySQL and SQLite. This release is available now on GitHub and SourceForge.
What Is Exponential Platform Legacy?
Exponential Platform Legacy is the maintained, GPL-licensed distribution of the eZ Publish 5 / 6 stack — 100% source-compatible with the original platform and actively maintained for PHP 8.2 through 8.5 by 7x. The 2.5.x series is the current stable release line and is the recommended starting point for new installations and migrations.
Theme System — Full Design Chain Ported from 3.x
The headline change in this release is the complete port of the multi-theme design resolution chain from the 3.x branch into the 2.5.x tree. Six new theme directories have been added to app/Resources/views/themes/, giving the site siteaccess the full inheritance chain it needs to render correctly from first install.
The design chain resolves in this order, from highest priority to base fallback:
- sevenx_content_website_app_developer — developer environment theme; renders the Hybrid Kernel Content View bar and developer environment bar via the notices variable
- sevenx_content_website_app_info — info variant theme for project and informational page types
- sevenx_content_website_app — primary application-level theme with content views, field templates, macros, and component templates
- fh — FH sub-theme providing site-specific layout overrides
- app — shared application fallback theme; provides component templates, embed views, gallery grid, accordion, card, and full content views
- common — common shared template partials reused across all themes in the chain
Additional theme-related additions include:
- Content view templates for folder, layout_container, and additional content types under themes/standard/content/, ensuring objects resolve to the correct full-view template during rendering rather than falling back to an empty default.
- A corrected standard/parts/page_footer.html.twig — the three-column footer layout (Ecosystem / Documentation / Project columns) with inline SVG icons and correct copyright attribution, replacing the incomplete placeholder that was previously present.
- A complete pagelayout_login.html.twig and standard/user/ template set, providing a full login page and user registration flow via the design chain.
- An overhauled pagelayout.html.twig — transformed from a bare HTML skeleton with no design includes into the full eZ Design-aware pagelayout that correctly includes page_head, page_styles, page_container, and page_scripts partials, and renders the page_title block with the correct product tagline.
Configuration — Design Chain, Content Views, and Siteaccess Matching
The app/config/ezplatform.yml configuration file received three significant updates in this release:
- The site_group.design setting has been switched from standard to site and the full ezdesign.design_list block has been introduced, wiring the complete theme chain described above.
- A long-standing syntax error was corrected: the missing comma between site and legacy_admin in the siteaccess list was causing legacy_admin to be silently excluded from the group and not inherit group-level configuration.
- Siteaccess matching has been switched from Map\Host (production hostnames) to URIElement: 1 for local development compatibility. default_page, pagelayout, and content_view rules for full views of folder, user_group, and layout_container content types have also been added, along with a field_templates entry pointing at the correct design-resolved field template.
Twig Extension — ChildrenExtension
A new ChildrenExtension Twig extension has been added at src/AppBundle/Twig/ChildrenExtension.php. It registers three Twig functions:
- get_children and ez_location_children — both aliasing the same getChildren() method, providing forward and backward compatibility between theme generations
- get_content_type_identifier — identifies content types during rendering
This extension is required by templates throughout the ported theme chain to retrieve child locations and identify content types. It has been registered in app/config/services.yml with the @ezpublish.api.repository constructor argument injected and tagged as a Twig extension.
Legacy Admin — Correct Design Resolution
The legacy admin siteaccess was incorrectly resolving templates from the outdated admin2 design because a local site.ini.append.php was overriding the correct vendor default. This release corrects SiteDesign to admin3 and adds admin3 as the first entry in AdditionalSiteDesignList, restoring the correct resolution order: admin3 → admin → standard → base.
The same file now also includes commented-out [DebugSettings] and SQLite-specific DatabaseSettings blocks so that developers can enable them locally without those development-only settings being active in a clean checkout.
SQLite Installer Support
This release introduces SQLite installer support for local development and CI/CD testing via the exponential-oss install type. A full clean install can now be performed against a local SQLite file (var/data_dev.db) without requiring a running MySQL or MariaDB server — making the platform installable in minimal environments such as CI runners, developer laptops, and sandboxed containers.
Kernel Fix — Composite Primary Key on SQLite
A critical bug in CoreInstaller.php (part of the ezpublish-kernel, branch 7.5) has been corrected. The installer's importSchema() method now detects when the active Doctrine database platform is a bare SqlitePlatform instance and substitutes it with SqliteDbPlatform before generating schema SQL.
Without this fix, tables requiring a composite PRIMARY KEY(id, version) — including the critical ezcontentobject_attribute table — were being created with a single-column INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT instead. This caused insertExistingField() to silently violate the PK uniqueness constraint during content versioning operations. The SqliteDbPlatform::getCreateTableSQL() method already contained the correct fix but was never being invoked by the installer. It is now.
Seed Data — Typo Correction
A long-standing typographical error in the welcome-page rich text body of ezcontentobject_attribute — where "Exponenital Platform" was misspelled — has been corrected to "Exponential Platform" in both the MySQL (data/mysql/cleandata.sql) and SQLite (data/sqlite/cleandata.sql) seed data files.
PHPUnit Modernization
The PHPUnit requirement in composer.json and phpunit.xml.dist has been set to ^10.5 — the maximum version compatible with the Symfony 3.4 stack used in the 2.5.x series. PHPUnit 11 introduces breaking API changes that are incompatible with this stack. This ensures that the test suite runs correctly on a current PHPUnit release without requiring a framework upgrade.
Package Dependency Update
The se7enxweb/exponential package constraint in composer.json has been version-bumped to point at the latest compatible release, keeping the full distribution consistent across all maintained packages.
Documentation and Funding
The README.md and INSTALL.md files have been fully rewritten for the 2.5.0.x release series, covering installation from Composer, the new SQLite local setup path, and a platform overview. GitHub Sponsors funding metadata has also been added via .github/FUNDING.yml.
If Exponential Platform is part of your stack, please consider supporting the project:
Site Assets
Favicons (web/favicon.ico and web/favicon.png) have been added for browser tab and bookmark display on the front-end site.
What's Coming Next
The next release in the 2.5.x series will continue refactoring PHP 8.4 and 8.5 deprecation warnings across the stack. Work on PHP 9 preparation is ongoing.
Download and Resources
Exponential Platform is not affiliated with eZ Systems or Ibexa. All software is GPL-licensed and free. 7x (se7enxweb) is the North American company that has maintained this platform and its ecosystem for 24+ years.