Craft V5 is now live in beta, and this upgrade has focused on creating the best CMS for developers and authors alike.

Increasingly user-friendly, it's now easier and faster to make edits on the platform, seriously boosting customisation and becoming more accessible, in line with WCAG AA standards.

From a technical point of view, the latest version runs on PHP 8.2, so it runs faster and smoother. Along with the latest patches, new security features offer increased rigour through two-step and biometric pass keys.

Craft CMS is recognised for its flexibility and user-centric design, and Craft 5 takes these qualities to the next level. Whether you're looking to upgrade or explore new platforms, here's why Craft 5 should be your go-to choice.

Craft 5 marks a monumental leap forward in content management system upgrade and developer experience, sculpted to elevate every aspect of your digital platform. We've categorised these new features into three core areas.

Author Experience

• Refined user interface. A lighter, crisper, and more welcoming control panel. Every touchpoint is fine-tuned, featuring a new icon set for clarity, a collapsible global sidebar for space efficiency, and more functional breadcrumbs.
• Element display enhancements. Element indexes and relational fields now showcase elements as cards with sizable thumbnails and customisable content previews, improving visual navigation.
• Dynamic element interaction. Introducing action menu buttons on element chips, cards, and slideouts, offering shortcuts to frequent actions like editing or previewing in a new tab.
• Efficient bulk editing. Streamline your workflow with inline editing capabilities across all visible elements from the table view.

Content Modelling

• Matrix enhancements. You can now embed Matrix blocks within other Matrix blocks, offering unlimited nesting capabilities without any restrictions on the depth of nesting.
• Rich text innovations: The CKEditor plugin has been revitalised for Craft 5, supporting nested entries directly within rich text content.
• Flexible entry types: Decouple entry types from sections for reusable designs across sites and enhance consistency.

Administration and development

• Advanced security options: Craft 5 introduces two-factor authentication and passkeys, a great addition to Craft CMS' security features.
• Improved accessibility: We're committed to achieving WCAG AA compliance and enhancing site accessibility for all users.
• Optimised loading. Lazy eager-loading for nested elements, simplifying queries and boosting performance.

We're Craft CMS experts here at Engage. Our in-house development team builds and maintains Craft CMS websites daily.

Our upgrade process covers a comprehensive discovery phase to ensure we are as familiar with a website as you are, including its capabilities and limitations.

We go through a process of compatibility checks to ensure that current plugins and themes are compatible with Craft CMS 5, identifying and solving any issues in advance.

This is followed by backing up the entire website before deploying the upgrade. This safety need ensures the site can be reverted, minimising risk completely.

We then move into testing. We run the update locally in our testing environment, making any necessary code changes to custom logic and templates before deployment and post-deployment testing.

Everything is coordinated with you to plan any live changes well in advance, avoiding critical periods and ensuring as little downtime as possible.

There's a lot to consider when upgrading, especially regarding older versions of Craft.

Our team is available to answer any questions about all versions of Craft and work with you to make a solid, risk-free plan for you.