Craft CMS 5.10: Safer Deletes, Time Zones, and an Important Security Fix
Craft CMS 5.10 makes deleting content safer, adds time zone support, and patches a high-severity security vulnerability. Here's what site owners need to know.
Craft CMS 5.10 launched this week. We maintain a good number of Craft sites, so we read every release note and sort the genuinely useful changes from the housekeeping. This one is mostly small quality-of-life improvements for editors — but it also includes an important security fix, which makes it worth a moment of your attention.
The short version: 5.10 patches a serious security vulnerability, makes deleting content safer, and adds a handful of conveniences for the people editing your site day to day. If we maintain your site, the security patch is already handled — there's nothing for you to do.
A safer way to delete content
The change editors will feel most: when you delete something that other content depends on, Craft now stops and warns you first.
Say an author is attached to forty blog posts, or a category is used across your whole product catalogue. Previously, deleting it was a quiet click with consequences you might not notice until a page broke. In 5.10 a window appears explaining what's connected to the item before anything is removed, so you can make an informed decision instead of guessing.
For anyone who has ever deleted the wrong thing and spent an afternoon undoing it, this is a genuinely reassuring addition.
Your control panel, in your time zone
5.10 adds a personal Time Zone preference, and timestamps throughout the control panel now show which time zone they're in.
If your team is spread across regions — or you work with a freelancer or office in another country — everyone now sees publish dates and scheduled times in their own local time. That removes a common source of confusion around "when does this actually go live?"
Clearer previews while editing
A few small touches make complex pages easier to navigate:
- Collapsed content blocks now show the entry's label as preview text, so you can find the block you want without expanding every one of them first.
- Number fields set to display as currency now show the currency symbol beside the value.
- Colour fields left empty now show as blank rather than a default swatch, so it's obvious at a glance which ones still need a value.
Less stale content, less duplicated effort
Edit screens and slideouts now refresh automatically when the same item is updated in another tab. If you've ever had two tabs open and accidentally saved over your own changes, this quietly prevents it. Content lists also refresh on their own after you duplicate an entry, so what you see stays accurate.
Automatic alternative text on images
When you upload an image, Craft now reads descriptive text from the file's own metadata and uses it to set the alternative text automatically.
Alt text matters for accessibility and for search engines, but it's the kind of field that gets skipped under deadline. A sensible starting value — which you can still review and refine — means fewer images going live with nothing at all. Worth a quick check rather than blind trust, but a good default.
For teams with editorial sign-off
Sections can now require a minimum number of authors on an entry. If your editorial process expects, say, a writer and an editor on every article, you can now enforce that in Craft rather than relying on people to remember.
More precise content filtering
The rules you use to filter and find content gained "is one of", "is not one of", and "does not equal" options. If you regularly dig through a large library — during a content audit, or to build a saved view — you can now narrow things down far more precisely without help from a developer.
The important bit: security
5.10 fixes a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability, plus two moderate issues. In plain terms: these are the kind of flaws you don't want to leave unpatched, and every Craft site should be updated promptly.
If we look after your site, this was applied as part of your maintenance — you don't need to act. If you're not on a maintenance plan, this is exactly the sort of release that shouldn't sit waiting.
What's routine (and safe to ignore)
A large part of the 5.10 changelog is written for developers: new template functions, API additions, and updated underlying components like Twig and Composer. These keep Craft current and give the people who build on it better tools, but there's nothing for an editor or owner to action. It's the routine maintenance you'd expect from a platform that's well looked after — quietly keeping the foundations sound.
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.
