2024 in Review

Another eventful year in the bag! Our most eventful year yet, actually: we took Dot One on the road, visiting Amsterdam, London, and Toronto in the Fall, giving us the chance to connect with Craft developers, hear some great talks, and share what’s going on at Pixel & Tonic.

2024 was also our most productive year yet. You could say it was a big year for finallys:

• We finally shipped nested Matrix fields in Craft 5.
• We finally shipped multi-store/multi-currency in Craft Commerce 5.
• We finally shipped starter projects for faster developer onboarding.
• We finally added ratings and reviews to the Plugin Store.
• We finally added 2FA to Craft CMS and Craft Console.
• We finally launched Craft Cloud.

In a world where the backlog always grows faster than the pace of development, it feels really good to say that these long-running, long-requested efforts are now behind us.

And that only scratches the surface of what we accomplished this year.

CMS

Craft 5.0 hit the streets in March. It brought a complete paradigm shift to content modeling in Craft, with entry types decoupled from their sections, the ability to create nested Matrix fields, and the ability to include multiple instances of custom fields within field layouts. We also shipped a major update to our CKEditor plugin, adding support for creating nested entries right within the rich text content.

To make it all possible, we made a pretty drastic change to the way Craft stores content in the database: we’re now using a JSON column, rather than various content tables. In hindsight, this was maybe the best refactoring decision we’ve ever made. It simplified large portions of the codebase, made it easier for field types to store data in a variety of shapes, and put to rest a couple scalability bugs that have plagued Craft since 1.0.

Craft 5 also introduced several UI improvements, like element card views, element action menus, inline entry type and field creation, bulk element editing, the ability to assign icons and colors to entry types, and new view modes for Matrix fields.

Since March, we’ve maintained a schedule of new point releases every couple months, with Craft 5.5 released in November. We’ve added new Link and Range field types, made it possible to move entries to new sections, added new CLI commands for managing entry types and custom fields, and we’ve improved the authoring workflow for content with nested entries.

Ecommerce

Craft Commerce 5.0 was released in April, delivering two of its most anticipated features: multi-store and inventory locations. With multi-store, it’s now possible to target and price products for individual stores. Each store can have its own base currency, making it a true multi-currency solution (as opposed to exchange rate-based currency conversions during checkout).

Commerce 5 also introduced catalog pricing, where all purchasable items’ prices are pre-calculated and cataloged in a database table, including any variations based on configured pricing rules. That table can then be used to sort products by the promotional price that the current user will see, right as part of the initial product query, drastically improving Commerce’s scalability and pricing flexibility.

We’ve also taken advantage of Craft 5’s new element type features in Commerce: products now support drafts, autosaving, and revisions; and product variants are now displayed in an embedded element index, speeding up Edit Product screens for products with hundreds of variants. Plus, we added support for custom line items in Commerce 5.1, and structured product types in Commerce 5.2.

We also released a new Stripe plugin this year. Like our Shopify plugin, the plugin will sync products, subscriptions, customers, invoices, and payment methods from Stripe into Craft, so they can be displayed on your site without turning Craft into a full-blown ecommerce system.

Services

In August, we officially unveiled Craft Cloud, our first-party hosting platform for Craft sites. Craft Cloud is designed to be fast, ultra-scalable, and secure by default, with a serverless infrastructure, full-page static caching, and a CDN, plus DDOS protection and an enterprise-grade Web Application Firewall (WAF) powered by Cloudflare.

It’s also designed to be simple, with an automatic deployment pipeline that handles installing Composer and NPM dependencies, running build scripts, applying project config changes, and running migrations. It even comes with built-in asset storage and an image transform service.

We launched with US, Europe, and Asia Pacific regions. Since then, we’ve added a new region in Canada, added Cron job support, and made other improvements to fine-tune reliability and performance as we work with an increasing variety of sites and traffic patterns. Customer feedback has been extremely positive, and I’m happy to say Cloud is gaining traction faster than we expected.

Beyond Cloud, our services team spent a lot of time improving Craft Console and the Plugin Store this year, including adding two-step verification to Craft Console, and adding ratings and reviews to the Plugin Store.

Outreach

We made a pretty exciting hire in July: Travis Gertz joined Pixel & Tonic as our first ever DevRel Engineer. He immediately got to work on the intro video for Craft Cloud, followed by designing and building the new starter projects.

Then there was the WordPress/WP Engine fiasco, which presented an opportunity to work on how we position ourselves against the “Big Blue” of the Web. That resulted in a new Craft CMS vs. WordPress landing page, a WordPress-inspired blog starter, and a new import tool built specifically for pulling in content (plus users, media, and taxonomies) from a WordPress site, easing the transition to Craft CMS.

Onward

We’re entering 2025 with a clean slate, and we’ve got some pretty ambitious plans for Craft, Commerce, and Cloud, as well as new initiatives for developer and client outreach. We can’t wait to get to work (and hopefully show off some things at this year’s Dot All event in Lisbon!).

Thanks to everyone in the community for choosing and supporting Craft CMS. It’s thanks to you that we get to crack open the laptop and work on these products and services every day. We couldn’t ask for a better group of people to work with and for.

Bring on 2025!