Craft CMS 5.6: Copy Content Between Sites and Improved Field Management
Craft CMS 5.6 adds the ability to copy field values between sites, enhanced condition rules for better filtering, and improved field management workflows.
Craft CMS 5.6 launched this week. Most of what's new helps teams running more than one site, or managing a lot of content — if that's you, the first change here saves real time. If you run a single site, this is a light release with nothing you need to do.
Copy content between sites
On a multi-site Craft install, content often needs to flow between sites with small adjustments — UK and US editions with spelling differences, or multilingual sites where some details are shared and others aren't.
5.6 adds a "Copy value from site..." action on individual fields. You can pull a value from one site into the same field on another, one field at a time, instead of copy-pasting between browser tabs or rebuilding content from scratch. It's most useful for:
- Translatable content with shared elements — product specs that stay the same alongside translated descriptions
- Regional variations — similar marketing content with localised references
- Brand variations — a shared foundation with brand-specific messaging
For teams maintaining parallel sites, this turns a fiddly, error-prone chore into a couple of clicks.
Smarter content filtering
The rules you use to find and filter content can now match multiple items at once in "Related To", "Not Related To", "Author", and relationship conditions. That means you can filter entries by several categories, or by any author on a given team, in one step rather than several.
A new "Field" condition also adds a "has a value" option — handy during a content audit for spotting entries where an optional field has, or hasn't, been filled in.
Interface refinements
Colour fields with a predefined palette now show as a simple dropdown rather than opening a full colour picker — quicker, and harder to pick an off-brand colour by accident. There's some visual tidying in card view too.
User management
5.6 adds ways to filter users by which site they're associated with and whether their account is fully set up — useful for keeping order on larger installs with a lot of accounts.
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.
