Yesterday Craft founder and CEO Brandon Kelly took the stage at our first Dot All conference in Portland to talk about the state of Craft in 2017, and what’s to come in the next few months!
We’ll publish a full video recording of the keynote in a few days, but in the meantime here’s a quick rundown of what was announced:
- 4/4/18 – Mark your calendars! Craft 3 GA, the Plugin Store, and Commerce 2 will all be released on April 4, 2018.
- Craft 3 RC1 – We’ll be releasing Craft 3’s first Release Candidate by the end of the year! It will feature Control Panel UI improvements, custom field layout tabs for Users and Global Sets, and enhanced Multi-Site with “Site Groups”.
- Plugin Store (beta) – A “beta” version of the Plugin Store will be launching in tandem with Craft 3 RC1, for non-commercial plugins only. We’ll work with developers to get as many of the existing Craft 3 plugins in there for the launch as possible. The final, commercial version of the Plugin Store will launch alongside Craft 3 GA on 4/4/18.
- Craft License – Craft 3 RC1 will introduce a new, drastically simplified license that’s inspired by the MIT license. It grants licensees permission to fork, modify, and distribute Craft, with just a few basic restrictions to ensure we can stay in business.
- Update Pricing – Speaking of ensuring we can stay in business, we’re making a slight change to our pricing model when Craft 3 GA ships. Craft Personal/Client/Pro license fees will remain the same, but we’ll start charging a small fee to renew access to updates after a year ($39/year for Client edition, $59/year for Pro edition). We’ll also be requiring commercial plugins in the Plugin Store to follow suit, and recommend they choose renewal prices around 20% of their base license fees as well. Note that all existing Client/Pro licenses will continue to receive free updates even after we make this change.
- Redactor and CKEditor Plugins – We’re moving the Rich Text field type out of Craft 3 RC1, into its own dedicated Redactor plugin. We’re also launching a new CKEditor 5-powered editor plugin, for people who want to live on the edge!
- Commerce 2 – Built for Craft 3, Commerce 2 ($999) will feature subscription support, tons of refactoring, and a new gateway interface that replaces OmniPay.
- Commerce Lite – Commerce Lite ($199) is “simple e-commerce for regular websites.” It will feature the same powerful product/purchasable, subscription, and custom gateway support as Commerce, but optimized for sites that don’t need comprehensive tax/shipping rules, sales or promotions, multi-item shopping carts, or a multi-step checkout flow.
You can check out the full slide deck for the keynote at Speaker Deck.