Craft CMS 5.8: Content Blocks, Generated Fields, and Content Validation
Craft CMS 5.8 introduces Content Block fields for reusable content structures, Generated Fields for auto-populated values, and content validation tools for better quality control.
Craft CMS 5.8 arrived this week. The changes worth flagging — Content Blocks, Generated Fields, and content validation — are all about keeping a growing site consistent without extra effort from editors. Here's what they mean in practice.
Content Block fields
The headline feature is the Content Block field: a reusable group of fields that can be dropped into different kinds of content.
Think of a Content Block as a small, reusable template. A "Call to action" block might hold a heading, body text, a button label, and a button link. That same block can then appear in blog posts, landing pages, and product pages — always with the same fields and the same shape.
For an owner, the payoff is consistency at scale: repeated patterns look and behave the same everywhere, editors aren't rebuilding them from scratch each time, and when the pattern needs to change you update it in one place rather than chasing it across the site.
Generated Fields
Generated Fields fill themselves in from your other content, rather than being typed out by hand. They're useful for things like:
- Preview text taken from the first paragraph of a body field
- Values assembled automatically from other fields
- Formatted text built from several inputs
The benefit is less manual data entry and fewer things to keep in sync — when the source content changes, the generated value updates with it. One less field for editors to remember to fill in.
Check content before you publish
5.8 adds a "Validate" action to edit screens. You can deliberately check an entry before publishing — confirming required fields are filled and the rules are met — rather than hitting save and finding out something's missing.
Genuinely useful for content with a lot of required fields or strict rules, where a quick check beforehand saves a back-and-forth later.
Smaller refinements
A few quality-of-life touches round things out:
- The Link field can now filter by the kind of link stored, and handles SMS links.
- Relationship fields tied to a single source now show a search box by default — a real help on sites with large content libraries, where scrolling a long list isn't practical.
- Content fields gained "Expand all" and "Collapse all" actions, so you can get an overview of a long page or drill into one part without toggling each block by hand.
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.
