Craft CMS 5.7: Content Duplication, Concurrent Editing Alerts, and Design Refresh
Craft CMS 5.7 adds duplicate and copy actions for entries, shows concurrent editing alerts, refreshes the design of cards and blocks, and includes undo for asset moves.
Craft CMS 5.7 launched this week. It's a strong release for anyone editing day to day: faster ways to reuse content, a safeguard against teammates overwriting each other, and a visual tidy-up.
Duplicate and Copy
5.7 adds Duplicate and Copy actions to entries, addresses, and nested content across lists, cards, and editable blocks.
The two are subtly different:
- Duplicate — creates a new copy right alongside the original
- Copy — puts a copy on your clipboard to paste elsewhere
Both keep the original's structure and field values. The benefit for editors is obvious the first time you need a near-identical team profile, product variant, or templated page: you start from a finished copy and tweak, rather than building from a blank screen each time.
You'll know when someone else is editing
Probably the most quietly valuable change in 5.7: when you open an entry, Craft now shows if someone else is already editing it.
That prevents a frustrating and surprisingly common problem — two people editing the same entry, the second save silently wiping out the first, and nobody realising until the lost work is noticed days later. For any team where more than one person touches the same content, this alone is worth the update.
A cleaner, clearer interface
Chips, cards, and editable blocks got a visual refresh. Cards now have a clear Edit button in the title bar rather than tucked inside a menu, and editing a block inside a flexible page now stays in place instead of bouncing you out to a separate screen. Less hunting, fewer detours.
Undo for asset moves
Moving assets now asks for confirmation on larger operations (over 50 files or 50MB), and for smaller moves the success message includes an Undo button. An accidental drag into the wrong folder is now one click to fix rather than a manual hunt to put things back.
Better sorting and filtering
Content inside blocks and nested fields can now be sorted by any field, so you can order it the way that makes sense rather than being stuck with the default. Filters for checkbox, dropdown, multi-select, and radio fields also gained "has a value" and "is empty" options — handy for finding entries with details missing during a content tidy-up.
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.
