Craft CMS 5.1: Team Edition Improvements and Better User Management
Craft CMS 5.1 makes the Team edition more flexible by allowing non-admin users and adds granular permission management for better team collaboration.
Craft CMS 5.1 landed this week with focused changes to team collaboration and user management. If you run a Craft site with more than one editor, there's one change here worth knowing about — the rest is minor polish you don't need to act on.
Team edition gets more flexible
The headline change: Team edition users no longer have to be administrators. Previously a Team edition licence meant full admin access for everyone on it, which ruled the edition out for organisations that wanted to give some people limited access.
In 5.1 you can add people to a Team edition site with restricted permissions — a client who should manage content but not system settings, writers who should edit posts but not users, or department managers who should only see their own sections.
Why this matters for an owner: it lets you bring more of your team into the site without handing everyone the keys. Fewer accidental changes to settings, clearer responsibilities, and a safer setup overall. The new User Permissions settings page is where you configure what non-admin Team users can access.
Smaller refinements
A few quality-of-life touches round out the release:
- Better mobile experience — element editor pages are tidier on phones and tablets. You still wouldn't build a complex layout on a phone, but reviewing content, nudging a publish date, or fixing a typo on the move is now practical.
- Interface tidy-up — sort options are alphabetically organised and custom fields are grouped together, which helps when you're working with a lot of fields. Tooltips now appear after a short delay rather than instantly, so there's less visual noise when scanning content.
Nothing here changes how your site works — it's the kind of steady, incremental improvement you want to see from a well-maintained platform.
Sources
Andrew is Technical Director at Mutual, a Craft CMS Partner agency. He has been building with Craft CMS since its public beta in 2012 — working through every major version from Craft 1 to Craft 5 — and has delivered over 100 sites for clients including Apple, Transparency International, and Arts University Bournemouth.
He writes about Craft CMS on the Mutual blog and has contributed to net Magazine. At Mutual, he leads development of Mutual One, a marketing platform built on Craft CMS as its foundation.
He has spoken about Craft CMS to undergraduate students at the University of Brighton and Canterbury Christ Church University, and appeared on the Devmode.fm podcast. He has also trained development teams at other agencies in working with the platform.
