It’s been five months since we released the Craft 3 Beta (time flies!) and there has been a ton of activity since then. Craft 3 has been Composer-installed almost 10,000 times already, about 500 bug reports and feature requests have been filed, and 34 pull requests have been submitted.
We’ve been busy too, of course. We’ve released 19 updates, packing 750 improvements and bugfixes, bringing Craft 3 ever closer to a GA release.
So how’s that GA release coming?
Great question.
When we launched the Beta, we said there’s three things that need to be done before Craft 3 is ready for prime time:
- Make it not buggy
- Update our plugins for Craft 3 (and help devs update theirs)
- Create the Plugin Store
Let’s take a look at where we’re at with all three.
1. Make It Not Buggy
We’ve been fixing bugs just as quickly as they show up – at time of writing there isn’t a single known Craft 3 bug that doesn’t also affect Craft 2. And thanks to all the refactoring work in Craft 3, we were even able to fix a few previously-unresolvable issues (#2, #16, #21, #1523), so Craft 3 actually has less known bugs than Craft 2.
Of course, there’s still plenty of unknown bugs waiting to be found. In the past five months we’ve fixed 265 of them (about 1.7 bugs/day) and while the rate is getting lower with each update, it’s still considerably higher than Craft 2.
2. Update Our Plugins (And Help Devs Update Theirs)
There are already 43 plugins available for Craft 3! For our part, we’ve ported Anchors, Contact Form, Element API, Query, and Store Hours, and we’re putting the finishing touches on Guest Entries, Hexdec, and Simple Text. We’ve also been actively helping plugin developers update their plugins in the #craft3 channel on Craft Slack.
Then there’s Commerce 2. We’re splitting that work into two parts: first we’re just trying to get the 1.x code running on Craft 3 (mostly done), followed by some new feature development and other improvements. We won’t be releasing it publicly until the latter is done.
3. Create the Plugin Store
We’ve spent a lot of time planning and designing the Plugin Store, and it’s currently in early stages of development. There’s a lot of moving parts, including an online portal for managing “Craft IDs”, OAuth 2-based Craft ID sign in, a new client-facing API, a Packagist-esque Composer repository, and Commerce 2 (which will be handling the payments). It’s a fun project, if a little hectic.
One of the challenges we faced was figuring out a pricing model that is both compatible with existing business practices and sustainable for plugin developers. After a bit of back-and-forth with the community, we’re happy with what we’ve settled on: plugins (and Craft) are going to cost a one-time license fee, plus optional yearly renewal fees to keep the updates flowing. We’ll recommend developers price the renewal fees somewhere between 20 and 50% of the original license fee.
Other Things
Those are the heavy hitters, but by no means an exhaustive list. You can find a more thorough roadmap at our 3.0 GA GitHub project, which we’re keeping updated with our progress.