Craft CMS 5.3: New Link Field Type and Entry Migration Between Sections
Craft CMS 5.3 introduces a versatile Link field replacing URL fields, plus the ability to move entries between sections - making content reorganisation much easier.
Craft CMS 5.3 arrived this week with two changes that genuinely make life easier for editors: a more capable Link field, and the ability to move entries between sections without recreating them.
The new Link field
5.3 introduces a Link field that replaces the old URL field and handles far more than plain web addresses:
- Web URLs — regular website links
- Email addresses — properly formatted
mailto:links - Phone numbers —
tel:links for click-to-call - Internal content — relations to entries, assets, or categories
The benefit for editors is fewer decisions and fewer mistakes. One field handles every kind of link, and the interface guides you to format each one correctly — no more broken mailto: links or mistyped phone numbers. Existing URL fields keep working, so nothing breaks; the Link field is simply the sensible choice for anything new.
Move entries between sections
You can now move entries between sections with a "Move to..." bulk action. Previously this meant recreating entries by hand — if you started with a single "News" section and later wanted to split it into company news, industry updates, and press releases, there was no clean way to do it.
The move keeps content, SEO data, and publishing history intact. That matters: it's a proper migration rather than a copy-and-delete that would have cost you search rankings and broken links. As a site grows and its content outgrows its original structure, this is the feature that lets you reorganise without fear.
Smaller refinements
Validation errors on nested entries inside content blocks now display more clearly, so editors can spot and fix issues before publishing. User permission screens gained keyboard shortcuts for saving, and new users can have permissions assigned before they're activated. Minor, but the kind of polish that adds up over time.
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.
