Craft CMS 5 demo at Dot All ‘23

The third and final day of Dot All 2023, the annual Craft CMS conference went off with a bang with the demo of Craft CMS 5 and Craft Commerce 5. There’s certainly plenty to look forward to over the coming year.

Craft CMS continues to grow

It’s fantastic to hear about the continued growth of Craft CMS and Craft Commerce. We’re proud to have played a major part in this. Not only as a leading Verified Craft and Craft Commerce Partners, but through activities such as our plugin development which has played a major part in Craft’s evolution. The Craft CMS community has always been known for its collaboration and knowledge-sharing, and it's great to see it flourishing.

Craft introduce scalable cloud hosting, hello Craft Cloud

The first demo of the morning related to the brand new Craft Cloud. This is scalable cloud hosting from the people behind Craft and it’s a move to retain more control of the whole experience for the end user. As well as enabling them to take a holistic approach to solving issues, it presents a sustainable approach. Craft Cloud offers 'serverless' on-demand processing power that only activates when needed.

We’re excited about this and it will be welcomed in the community. Pricing may be perceived as a little high but it includes valuable services, such as a Craft Pro licence, making it a comprehensive package for serious Craft users.

What will Craft Cloud include?

• Auto-scalable, always available
• Global CDN
• Static caching
• MySQL and PostgreSQL
• Automated backups
• Enterprise-grade WAF
• CI/CD build pipeline
• Craft CLI commands
• Multiple environments
• On-demand queue workers
• On-demand image transforms
• Fully supported
• Auto SSL

Craft CMS 5 is on the way

The Craft CMS 5 update focuses heavily on the author experience with both subtle and substantial alterations to the CMS's user experience and user interface. This includes the introduction of a 'card view' during entry for a more intuitive and user-friendly content management experience.

Craft CMS 5 will also introduce a re-structure of how data is stored. This will mean that it really is no issue to grow to millions of lines of data along with the decoupling of entry types to give more flexibility for managing and organising content. And Craft CMS 5 will introduce extended support and editing capabilities for long-form content, making it easier for authors to manage and create lengthy content pieces.

What to expect from Craft Commerce 5

The focus here is on multi-site, multi-currency support. In practice, this means that each Craft Commerce 5 site within a multi-site installation can have its own store, complete with its unique currency. This has been one of the most requested features of commerce since the beginning of multi-site and we have advocated for it for some time, so it is very welcome.

Catalogue pricing will also be introduced. This will allow for the creation of rules and pricing for specific users or product groups. Again, this is something we have asked for previously and it’s useful because the client will no longer need to resort to sales and promotions to offer discounted pricing. And there is a solid upgrade path making the upgrade from Craft Commerce 4 to Craft Commerce 5 much more viable for our clients, which means that they will benefit from the most advanced software at the earliest opportunity.

In summary

Reflecting on today’s demo, we are really excited to see the proposed Craft CMS 5 improvements. Firstly because we have even more control over where we can place, share and show data across the client site. This will inevitably lead to improved user experience and journeys. And secondly, the upgrade to performance is also welcome as both authors and website visitors will benefit.

As we reflect on the State of Craft in 2023, it's clear that Craft CMS and the community are thriving and evolving, driving innovation in web development and content management. We look forward to embracing these changes and continuing to contribute to the growth and success of Craft CMS 5 in the months to come.

If you'd like to know more about Craft CMS 5 or Craft Commerce 5, why not get in touch and let's start a conversation?