2021

Another big year is in the books. Our team—16 of us now!—has been firing on all cylinders, improving our products and creating new tools, services, and documentation to improve the overall experience of working with Craft CMS.

Here’s rundown of what happened this year:

Craft CMS

• Craft CMS 3.6 and 3.7 were released.
• The entry publishing flow was doubly-improved.
• Live Preview has mobile and tablet viewports now.
• Element editor HUDs were replaced with slideouts.
• Matrix, Neo, and Super Table fields now track/merge changes recursively.
• Assets have dedicated Edit pages, and subfolders are deep-linkable on the Assets index page.
• It’s now possible to impersonate another user in a private window by copying their impersonation URL.
• Global sets are custom-sortable now.
• Date fields now have a “Show Time Zone” setting.
• Major features are now announced to all control panel users in the “What’s New” HUD.
• Craft Pro and commercial plugins can now be purchased on production environments, even when allowAdminChanges is disabled.
• User creation and password resets are now possible right from the CLI.
• We’ve implemented dozens of accessibility improvements for people with vision and mobility impairments.
• Updating and plugin installation/deinstallation is 10 times faster thanks to Composer 2.
• We added PHP 8 support.
• Boolean and dropdown settings can now be set to environment variables.
• Craft now supports custom PostgreSQL schemas even if they aren’t in the search_path.
• Performance for editing entries within Structure sections has improved substantially.

Craft Commerce

• Craft Commerce 3.3 and 3.4 were released.
• Partial payments are now supported.
• Carts can now display notices that explain unexpected changes to line items.
• Shipping rules can now have dynamic condition formulas.
• Carts can now be loaded into new user sessions with special “Share cart” links.
• Store admins can now manage customers’ address books in the control panel.
• Multiple orders’ PDFs can now be combined and downloaded as a single PDF.
• Discounts can now be deleted in bulk.

Craft Nitro

• Nitro 2 was released, and now runs on Docker.
• Nitro now fully supports ARM CPUs, like M1.
• Linux and Windows support has been improved.
• All projects now share a single nitro.yaml file.
• nitro commands are now context-aware.
• Each project con now have its own PHP version/configuration.
• All projects have automatic SSL support.

More

• We hired three new people this year: Tim, Lupe, and Kenneth.
• We launched two new demo sites, “Europa Museum” and “Spoke & Chain”.
• Our Craft Cloud infrastructure is being put through its paces with craftcms.com and generated demo sites running on it.
• We launched the Accessibility Blog.
• You can now get a sense for what’s coming from our product roadmap.
• There’s new event code generators in Craft CMS and Craft Commerce documentation, for producing boilerplate event code with a similar filtering UI as our Webhooks plugin.
• John Morton handed the reins to Craft Link List over to us in January. We published 19 issues throughout the year.
• The class reference is current again, thanks to the Yii team adding support for newer PHP syntaxes.
• The CKEditor plugin is now stable.
• We hosted a virtual Dot All conference in October. (Check out the State of Craft and State of Craft Commerce talks if you haven’t already!)
• There are now over 900 plugins in the Plugin Store, and we’ve paid out over $3,000,000 to plugin developers since its launch!
• The Craft Stack Exchange site graduated out of Beta (finally).

Onward

As eventful as this year has been, so much of what we worked on hasn’t even seen the light of day yet:

• Craft CMS 4 and Craft Commerce 4 have been in development for most of the year. We’re targeting Q1 2022 for Beta releases, and if all goes well, Q2 for stable releases. These will kick off our new annual release cycle for major versions. Each major version will come with two years of full support, and one more year for critical security fixes.
• We’re exploring new ways to build ecommerce sites with Craft, for cases where Craft Commerce is overkill.
• A new version of our Craft ID portal is in the works. We’re renaming it to Craft Console and adding the ability to centrally manage licenses, Partner profiles, plugins, and billing info under Organizations.
• The Plugin Store will be getting an upgrade soon, making it easier to evaluate and install plugins.
• Nitro 3 is well underway, with NVM support, the ability to “suspend” projects so they don’t spin up when you run nitro start, and sharable per-project nitro.yaml configs.
• We’re gearing up to launch Craft Cloud in 2022. It has grown in scope since the original announcement, but for the better. Craft Cloud is now designed with all types of Craft sites in mind, not just headless sites. Plugins, modules, and Twig templates will all be supported.

With the new release cycle and launch of Craft Cloud, we expect that 2022 is going to be a pivotal year for Craft. We can’t wait to see it, and hope you’re as excited as we are!