PHx 2.2.0 for Evolution CMS: Better Placeholders and PHP 5.3 Support

This donor announced a practical PHx release rather than a theoretical rewrite. The value was in a handful of fixes that removed real friction from production projects.

What Improved

• Placeholder handling became more reliable, including values used inside @CODE blocks.
• The then and else branches behaved more predictably when chunks or snippets were involved.
• Snippet cache handling produced fewer unnecessary database requests.
• String helpers were replaced with safer multibyte-friendly alternatives, which mattered for Cyrillic content.
• The package behaved better on PHP 5.3.

For legacy Evolution CMS sites, PHx often sat directly in the template layer. Small parser bugs could therefore affect large parts of a site at once. That is why incremental PHx updates were worth documenting.

Why This Release Mattered

The main gain was not new syntax. It was predictability. If a project already relied on PHx-heavy templates, a release like this reduced random parser edge cases and lowered the cost of keeping older builds running.

Source: original community announcement. Related package page: PHx package page. Code: Temus/PHx on GitHub.