The 2026 Craft CMS conference as it happened

Our development team were down in London for Dot One, an event that sees our UK community gather to discuss everything Craft CMS. It’s hosted by the brilliant Pixel and Tonic, the brains behind Craft. With Craft 6 on the horizon, talks focused on what to expect, the shift to Laravel, as well as the practicalities of the new system. Here’s what we discovered. 

When will Craft 6 launch? 

The day opened with a review of the State of Craft, the keynote from Craft CMS Founder and CEO, Brandon Kelly. We anticipated that a launch date for Craft 6 would be announced and we were not disappointed. Beta is expected in November, with public release early next year in March. 

Brandon’s presentation offered plenty for both developers and content authors. In a list of over twenty new features, Craft 6 promises further customisation, improved performance, better UI, more flexibility when building applications and AI integration. Element Queries have also been rewritten to provide a 50x speed increase over Craft 5!

Another exciting announcement was the introduction of a gallery section on the Craft website, which will showcase Craft CMS websites. Users can filter by industry and available case studies, making it a helpful tool for demonstrating the CMS to clients in the context of their industry. 

Built-in MCP is coming 

Following the keynote, Pixel and Tonic Director of Engineering, Tim Kelty, presented An MCP server for Craft. For those not familiar, an MCP or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets AI assistants securely connect to external data sources, content models, and development environments.

Craft MCP, available in V5.12,  brings Model Context Protocol support to Craft CMS, letting AI tools understand how a site’s content is organised and interact with it directly. Tim explained how Craft will provide an MCP to AI agents, allowing them to understand a website’s content and deliver that content to the public. He also showed how content editors can utilise AI to review and publish content directly into Craft.

Introducing MCP to both Craft 5 and 6, allows us as developers to maintain and create content models in a more controlled and safer way, with detailed permissions. It will also allow users more powerful tools within the CMS UI to use AI in creating and managing content.

It’s easy to see the benefit that this will bring. Anything that makes it easier for us to find information, make changes or automate repetitive tasks means we can spend more time problem-solving and finding creative solutions for our clients. 

A walkthrough of Laravel 

For the next presentation, August Miller, Technical Writer at Pixel and Tonic,  treated us to tales from the trenches. This talk, entitled Laravel for Craft CMS developers, walked us through August’s own experiences with Craft 6. 

He covered the transition and differences in Craft 6. For us, it was interesting to hear more technical, high-level details of the features developed. Topics ranged from the complex to the very complex, such as dependency injection. In particular, we’re looking forward to taking advantage of Laravel having more succinct syntax. 

August managed to cover a lot in a short space of time. Luckily for us all of this is in the Craft 6.X documentation, so we can look forward to digesting that at a later date!

This talk introduced the philosophical direction of Laravel, including changes to events and controllers. It looks like there will be plenty of opportunity to streamline our custom plugins and modules.

Upgrading plugins for Craft 6

Next up was Luke Holder, Snr Software Engineer at Pixel and Tonic. In his talk, Upgrading custom modules and plugins for Craft 6, Luke covered custom module code and plugins for Craft CMS and everything developers need to convert and upgrade code to run on it.

Building on the third talk, this session offered a more practical look at the upgrade process, with side-by-side examples showing how tools such as craft6-revamp and yii2-adapter can simplify the transition. The new revamp command is a useful starting point for identifying which parts of a codebase are likely to work and what needs updating, although it isn't designed to handle the full conversion of plugins on its own.

We also saw how AI skills can help developers update plugin syntax for Craft 6, potentially saving time and helping to maintain code accuracy and consistency. These skills will be made available through the Craft CMS GitHub repository, with more AI skills expected to follow in the future. It will be interesting to document our own experiences of using these tools to update our plugins and see just how much they can help with the migration process.

AI is uncovering more vulnerabilities than ever before

Given how events unfolded the day before Dot One, the irony of this next talk was not lost on us! Pixel and Tonic’s Chief Technical Officer, Brad Bell brought us Artificial Intelligence, Real Vulnerabilities. 

This was an entertaining and meme-laden insight into security and discovery of vulnerabilities in the age of AI. It’s scary how AI is uncovering vulnerabilities for everybody, not just Craft. It’s also bad for poorly maintained and rarely updated software tools. For actively maintained software, however, it means more security. 

Craft itself has implemented rigorous processes for exploits to be reported, assessed, fixed, released and disclosed. This, combined with our partnership with Servd for our secure hosting, means that we are actively managing all of our sites 24/7.

A redesigned control panel for Craft 6

Presented by Brian Hanson, UI Components in Craft 6 explored the redesigned control panel UI in Craft 6, which is built on Vue and Inertia. The talk covered the key updates and what plugin authors need to know to work with the new interface, highlighting how these changes affect the development and integration of plugins.

A key part of the update is that the entire CMS is now built using a shared set of UI components. These components are available for reuse across plugins and modules, helping developers create interfaces that are consistent with the core Craft experience. They are also fully documented and showcased in a Storybook component gallery, giving plugin authors an accessible reference to explore the available components and understand how to use them in their own projects.

The new web components that the Craft team have used to build the CP and have now made available to everyone building plugins are great! This will make our job easier to build plugins that match the style and functionality to the rest of the CMS.

The Craft community is tight-knit, and we always love the opportunity to catch up, share ideas and see what the future might have in store. This Dot One delivered a clear vision for the future of Craft CMS. With Craft 6 on the horizon and the upcoming shift to Laravel, it marks a major leap forward. The future of Craft offers developers more control and flexibility while giving content creators a faster, smarter, and more refined CMS experience.