This was an incredibly eventful and productive year for us. Our team grew to new heights, we kickstarted a new release cycle with Craft 4 and Commerce 4, rebooted Dot All as a hybrid event, launched Craft Console with support for Organizations, released a first-party Shopify integration, retired Craft Nitro in favor of putting our weight behind DDEV, and made huge progress on Craft Cloud. Whew!
Team
We hired three new people: Brian and Iwona joined us to help with Craft CMS development, and August joined to help with documentation. That brings our team up to 17 people!
Plugin Store
Early into the year we launched an update to the Plugin Store, with a refreshed design and new plugin vitals that make it easier to gauge how actively used and maintained a plugin might be. Each plugin now features an Active Installs chart showing how the plugin has trended over the past 30 days, as well as counters for active Pull Requests and Issues, pulled from GitHub.
Looking forward, we’ve got some ideas on how to improve plugin discoverability and license verification, which we’ll be exploring in the coming months.
Craft CMS
We launched Craft 4.0 in May, with several authoring improvements such as conditional fields, custom element sources, element index filtering, user addresses, Money fields, and more.
We continued to push new authoring improvements throughout the year with Craft 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3, including toast-style user notifications and customizable table columns. Accessibility has improved significantly in each 4.x release as well, as we work toward WCAG AA compliance.
Craft 4.4 is currently underway, which will mark the deprecation of categories, tags, and global sets, in favor of entries. Entries fields are gaining a new “Maintain hierarchy” setting which will be available when a single Structure section is selected as the field’s source, and causes the field to behave like Categories fields.
We expect to launch Craft 5 Beta in Q4, and a stable release will follow in Q1 of 2024. Craft 5’s focus will be on content modeling improvements, with entries playing a more dominant role across the board, and even becoming nestable thanks to a brand new “Inception” field type.
Craft Commerce
Craft Commerce 4.0 launched alongside Craft 4. Our main goal with Commerce 4 was to tighten its integration with Craft CMS: customers are now represented by native users; customer addresses use the built-in address book feature added in Craft 4; and discounts, shipping zones, and tax zones each take advantage of Craft’s new condition framework.
Commerce 5 is already underway, and will deliver on the most popular feature request Commerce has ever had: Multi-Store.
Shopify
We launched a new Shopify integration in November, which syncs Shopify products and variants into Craft as their own element type. Products can be augmented with custom fields, and related to other site content.
Considering Shopify is by far the most popular ecommerce option out there, we’re excited to see what people do with this integration. It enables a new class of “ecommerce sites”, for clients who are ready to invest in their marketing presence, but whose ecommerce needs don’t line up with Craft Commerce quite yet.
Craft Console
In November we launched Craft Console, a new customer portal that replaced Craft ID and introduced a major new feature: Organizations. With Organizations, it’s now possible to manage Craft CMS and plugin licenses, Plugin Store listings, and your Partner Network profile as a team.
One of the main goals we had for Console was to improve license management for clients, which can get hairy depending on how licenses are purchased to begin with:
- Some agencies prefer to make all license purchases themselves. It’s the easiest approach because they know exactly what they need. However it becomes problematic when the agency and client part ways, because there’s typically no formal license handoff at the end of the relationship. So the client will end up finding that they don’t have access to (what they assumed are) their own licenses.
- Other agencies prefer for their clients to purchase their own licenses, and send the license keys back to the agency so they can be added to the project. This approach adds a lot of friction, but it’s safer for the client in the long run.
Console Organizations introduces a new workflow, which offers the best of both worlds without the drawbacks. Clients can create their own organizations, and add their developers as members. Then developers can make license purchases on behalf of their client, and the client will own the resulting licenses.
Craft Generator
Just earlier this month, we released Craft Generator, a new CLI tool for scaffolding Craft plugins and modules. It can also be used to add new system components to existing plugins and modules (and even Craft CMS itself). So rather than needing to know exactly which features your plugin is going to need up front, you can add components to it over time, as needed.
Craft Cloud
We didn’t launch Craft Cloud this year as we’d hoped. But we made a lot of progress, and it’s getting close.
Our goal for Cloud is to eliminate DevOps from the Craft development experience. We want it to be the no-brainer choice when it comes time to launch a new Craft site. If that’s going to be the case, it needs to be scalable, fast, secure, and simple. No fussing over server specs, storage space, SSL, build pipelines, staging environments, etc. It just needs to work—quickly and reliably.
Cloud runs on a serverless architecture enhanced with AWS Global Accelerator and Cloudflare, ensuring it’s both scalable and fast, no matter where in the world your visitors are coming from. It will feature automatic Composer and NPM builds, multiple environments based on Git branches, built-in logging, image transforms, asset storage, SSL, firewall, and DDoS protection. Just about everything you’re going to need, wrapped up in a single one-size-fits-most hosting plan.
We’re really excited about Craft Cloud. We think it’s going to be a game-changer, providing a major quality-of-life improvement for existing Craft developers, and it will put Craft in a better position to compete against WordPress (with WP Engine) and SaaS-first CMSs like Contentful and Sanity. Developers won’t have to choose between power and simplicity; they’ll get both with Craft CMS and Craft Cloud.
Dot All + Community
Seeing people face-to-face again at Dot All was incredible. Each of the speakers did an amazing job, and we can’t wait to share the session videos publicly in the coming weeks.
We’re currently exploring venue options for next year’s Dot All, which will be held in Barcelona! We’ll put out a request for speakers in the coming weeks, once we have the dates nailed down.
Honcho agency recently published the results of their second annual Craft CMS developer survey, and we were stoked to see the results. The community has grown more diverse, client satisfaction remains high at 8.1/10, and developer satisfaction is exceptionally high at 9.3/10.
Both years’ survey results revealed that a top request is nested Matrix fields, which will be addressed in Craft 5 with Inception fields. And it’s clear that DevOps remains a major pain point, which we’re solving with Craft Cloud. So we think we’re on the right track, and the future looks very bright!