News, tutorials, and release announcements for the Wheels CFML MVC framework.
Wheels 4.0 ships a stdio MCP server that exposes the CLI to AI editors — not as a chat sidekick, but as a tool surface a model can call. This post walks the architecture (reflection over a single CFC), builds a commenting feature end-to-end via Claude, and is honest about the config-template drift I hit while writing it.
A broad how-to on the Wheels 4.0 migrator: write up()/down() migrations, drive the TableDefinition column builder (including the three-column timestamps() and the columnNames-preferred helpers), seed with inline SQL, and run the migrate CLI — including the doctor/info/forget/pretend commands that keep a shared dev database honest.
Wheels 4.0 replaces plugins with a package system that treats your filesystem as the registry. This post takes a small package from empty directory to installed-and-mixed-in, names every field in the manifest, and is honest about the rough edges I hit while writing it.
Wheels 4.0.3 is the third patch on the 4.0 line, focused on making the `wheels` CLI trustworthy in scripts and CI: argument parsing is rebuilt end-to-end (`--no-*` negations and named-only flags finally reach every command), failures exit non-zero, and write-side commands refuse to attach to a different project's server. Plus PostgreSQL/CockroachDB foreign-key migration fixes, pre-23c Oracle support, preserved column casing in model output, and a fix that stops framework helpers from being URL-invokable as controller actions.
Wheels 4.0.2 is the second patch on the 4.0 line. It teaches the migrator how to cope with a database that more than one developer shares — orphan-version detection, a `migrate doctor` health report, and `forget` / `pretend` reconciliation commands — fixes a class of silent migration rollbacks on MSSQL, makes the migrator's column-name helpers consistent, and ships native signed apt.wheels.dev / yum.wheels.dev package repositories so Linux installs and upgrades are a one-liner.
Wheels 4.0.1 is out — the first patch on the 4.0 line. It hardens Adobe ColdFusion 2023/2025 compatibility, fixes the Windows Scoop install regressions reported after GA, adds CSS-framework presets to paginationNav(), short-circuits whereIn([]) so empty filters stop emitting invalid SQL, and threads about a hundred smaller fixes through the rest of the framework.
Wheels 4.0 ships a real middleware pipeline, and three of the things you used to reach for a plugin to add — rate limiting, CORS, and security headers — are built in. This post walks through wiring a JSON API with per-API-key rate limits, sane proxy handling, and the right ordering so you do not accidentally weaken the very headers you were trying to add.
Wheels 4.0 decomposes the framework's rim against the CFML engine, pulls dependency injection and the test runner in-house as wheelsdi and WheelsTest, and breaks the monolithic boot sequence into discrete phases. Nothing a user of the framework notices at the surface. Everything a contributor notices when they try to add the next feature.
Wheels 4.0 lands with seven breaking changes and a Legacy Compatibility Adapter for teams that cannot touch every call site this quarter. This post is the honest map: what breaks, how to detect it, how to fix it, and when the adapter is the right answer instead.
For years, the same rows showed up red in every framework comparison: no bulk ops, no polymorphic associations, no advisory locks, no middleware, no browser testing. Wheels 4.0 closes those gaps. This is a guided tour of what changed and where the framework still trails.