2025 is a wrap!
Outward-facing, this felt like a relatively typical year: we released a few exciting software updates, made some website improvements, and hosted our big Dot All developer conference.
Behind the scenes, the year was anything but. We completely rebuilt our Partner Network, from signup to listings. Craft Cloud has matured significantly as its adoption has grown. We’re taking steps to grow up a bit as a company, including pursuing SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliance. And we’re in the process of rearchitecting Craft CMS as a Laravel application—a massive feat that we’re incredibly excited about.
Craft CMS
This year saw the releases of Craft CMS 5.6, 5.7, and 5.8, bringing tons of exciting authoring improvements, like cross-site field copying, element copy/paste support, Content Block fields, inline search for relation fields, and so much more.
Craft 5.9 is right around the corner. Most notably, this release adds the ability to split your Entries index into multiple pages. That’s useful if you want to convert existing category groups and tag groups into entries, but want to keep the management of that content separate from the rest of your entries.
As of 5.9, categories and tags will be officially deprecated, per our “entrification plan.” That doesn’t mean you have to switch everything over to entries right away though. In fact, we’ve made it possible to keep categories and tags around in Craft 6 with an optional package, so you can switch over to entries whenever it makes the most sense for your projects.
Of course, the big news with Craft is the switch to Laravel coming in Craft 6. This isn’t just a port; we’ve rearchitected how Craft works in relationship to its framework, so Craft can be run as part of a Laravel application, alongside other code. That shift is going to enable Craft to be used in a whole new way: as a CMS component that can be added onto existing applications, rather than something that needs to be maintained independently.
Craft Commerce
Craft Commerce also saw three big updates this year: 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5. These releases brought several store management improvements, like the ability to customize product and variant cards and more powerful product and variant indexes. We’ve also added powerful new administration tools, like new conditions and condition rules throughout the system, new config settings, and new events.
Commerce 6 is underway, which will bring two highly anticipated features: authentication-based GraphQL queries, drastically improving Commerce’s headless support; and reports, giving store admistrators great insight into their store’s metrics.
Craft Cloud
This was Craft Cloud’s first full year in business, and it grew quite a bit in that time. We’ve added several highly-requested features, like support for redirects, CDN URL rewrites, improved logging, custom asset domains, edge-side include tags, and more.
We’ve also made several performance and stability improvements behind the scenes:
- We added new database clusters in the EU and US.
- We made even more parts of the system regional, ensuring data and network traffic stay as close to home as possible.
- We deployed a new database backup infrastructure that is faster, more reliable, and produces smaller backups.
- We deployed a new builder and CLI command infrastructure that is consistently faster and more reliable, regardless of overall system load.
- We added rate limiting for overly-agressive bots.
- We improved application-level caching for all projects.
The service has grown to host nearly 200 projects, many of which are extremely high traffic sites. By the numbers, this year Cloud has served 7.5 billion requests, prevented 200 million malicious requests, and mitigated eight significant DDoS attacks.
We’re going to keep up the pace in 2026, with several planned improvements to the infrastructure and project management within Craft Console, like exposing traffic metrics, improved VCS integrations, environment cloning and syncing, improved scheduled commands, and more.
Accessibility
We made some pretty huge strides on the accessibility front this year. Craft CMS has continued its journey toward WCAG conformance, and we’ve also started improving the accessibility of craftcms.com, the documentation, the starter projects, and Craft Console. Lupe has started posting accessibility updates to the blog, to keep track of it all. (And don’t miss her awesome lightning talk from Dot All about improving the accessibility of Craft’s Image Editor!)
Resources
This year we introduced The Glossary, a complete list of terms and explanations for all things Craft. And we released starters for two new front-end frameworks: Next.js and Astro.
We also launched the What’s New page, which shows off all the author-facing features we’re adding to Craft—a great place to point your clients when discussing upgrades.
All told, it’s been a pretty big year for Craft. We’re proud of what we accomplished, and even more excited about what the future has in store!