Last week we hosted Dot All 2025 in beautiful Lisbon, Portugal, where we announced our plans for Craft 6.
The big news: we’re switching to Laravel.
That’s not a decision we made lightly, but we’re confident it’s the right choice. Laravel is by far the most familiar PHP framework among Craft developers, and it comes with a massive ecosystem of Laravel-optimized packages and services Craft will be able to tap into.
We’ve been through a major framework transition before, when we updated to Yii 2 for Craft 3. Yii 2 was a complete rewrite, and we took the opportunity to rewrite and refactor most of Craft’s code as well.
The end result was an update that took several years too long, required plugins to be rewritten for a completely new underlying codebase, and worst of all, didn’t have any compelling new author-facing features. Tough sell.
We’ve learned our lesson. To ensure this transition goes a little smoother than the last one, there are a few things we’re doing differently this time around.
First, this is (mostly) a strict port to Laravel. We’re very happy with the current state of Craft’s architecture, and will not be refactoring much code in the process. Extending Craft 6 will feel very familiar for existing Craft developers.
Second, we’re building a Yii 2 adapter package, which provides a compatibility layer for plugins and modules written for Craft 5, keeping breaking changes to an absolute minimum. Simply include it in your plugin or project, and keep it around as long as you need it. In most cases, the plugin will continue to work without making a single change.
And third, we’re planning several exciting author-facing features for Craft 6:
- Content releases – publish multiple new entries/drafts at once, either manually or at a scheduled time.
- Scheduled drafts – schedule a single draft to be published at a certain time.
- Content importing – import your content using a built-in importer tool.
- Content approval workflows – create content governance workflows that control how entries get published.
- Edit page commenting – provide feedback for other authors within an entry’s edit page.
- Element activity logs – see a timeline of changes to the entry you’re editing.
Craft 6 will also sport a new UI, with dark mode support and a first-class mobile experience. We’re building it with the Lion web component framework, and we’ll be making it available to plugin developers as a decoupled component library, complete with a Storybook-based style guide. And of course, each of its components are being tested to ensure they’re WCAG 2.2-conformant.
As for timing, we expect to ship Craft 6 Beta in Q3 of 2026, with a GA release following in Q4.
Finally, we’re excited to announce that Craft 5 is now an LTS (Long-Term Support) release, which means we’re going to continue supporting it and maintaining it for five years after Craft 6 is fully released. That should give everyone plenty of time to make the transition on their own terms.
The future is bright!