On ChatGPT's recommendation, I have created a patch release of Empathy MVC that includes a small update in the readme.  This is just a heads-up to explain that the rapid progression from version one to version four wasn't intended.  Apparently it can be quite common when releasing software to commit to a version 1.0 release too early.  Which is kind of ironic as, before I decided to adopt semantic versioning which changelogs, I had been hovering around an unofficial 0.9 version for about fifteen years or more.  I'm super glad that I have now gone fully into using semantic versioning for Empathy and the surrounding libraries.  It's not perfect.  Recently I made upgrades from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5, which arguably whould have pushed the MVC component to version 5!  If your project breaks due to bootstrap there could be problems which I haven't had time to prepare guides for.  This is because In a nutshell it's worth going with Bootstrap 5 under any circumstance due to the dropped support of version Bootstrap 4.  You can use the files in the "Empathy Application Architype" files that are in the Empathy MVC git repo under "/eaa" to give you a Bootstrap 5 base.  i.e. the package.json and Gruntfile.  Doing composer update with version 4 of empathy will upgrade all libs to use Bootstrap 5 but you may need to migrate your Smarty templates.

As explained in the README.md file the progression from version 1 to version 4 of Empathy was all to do with the under-the-hood changes to how models are handled and the (simple) active-record-like ORM.  These were changes that were long overdue as it wasn't previously possible to use paramtised SQL queries to prevent SQL injection attacks.  This along with the changes for PHP 8.4 meant lots of breaking changes and some upgraded depenencies.  I really want it to be clear that if you ever run into issues running composer update on your project and something breaks you can contact me and I can do more work on the relevant release branches.

Thanks.

Peace ✌🏼