The History of Craft CMS: From Blocks to Laravel

Emma and I started using Craft before Mutual even existed. We were already building on it years before we set up the agency in 2016. We watched it announced as Blocks CMS, built on the 1.0 beta, migrated client sites through the brutal Yii 2 rewrite, and we're currently running Craft 6 alpha builds in our own sandbox ahead of its Laravel-powered GA release. This is our account of how Craft got here, and where it's going next.

(Write in if you spot any mistakes!)

2012: Blocks CMS

Pixel & Tonic was already well known in the ExpressionEngine world, our CMS of choice at the time. They created the add-ons you couldn't ship a good EE site without.

Craft was announced on Twitter in 2012 under the working title Blocks CMS. The idea was that different features, like multi-lingual, were "blocks" you could add-on rather than a set price for the whole CMS. But the news was big for us and the EE community at the time, Pixel & Tonic were trying on their own.

2013: Craft 1.0

The public beta opened in November 2012, and Craft 1.0 shipped on June 4, 2013. It had a clean, responsive control panel and that previously mentioned à la carte pricing model (separate paid packages for things like multi-user support, drafts, and cloud asset storage).

The real turning point came with Craft 1.3 and the Matrix field. P&T had built Matrix for ExpressionEngine first; the Craft version, with multiple block types per field, is still the feature most long-time developers point to when asked why they stuck with the platform. We haven't built a site without Matrix since.

2014–2017: Craft 2 and the early community

Craft 2.0 (April 2014) simplified the pricing and brought in set pricing-points, a wider control panel, categories, and the {% cache %} tag. By the second online Craft Summit, P&T reported around 10,000 sites running Craft, up from 3,300 a year earlier.

That event also brought one of Craft's more important hires: Luke Holder joined and brought his Market plugin with him, the seed of what became Craft Commerce.

Craft 2.5 (December 2015) redesigned the control panel into roughly the layout Craft still uses today, and Craft Commerce 1.0 launched the same day.

2017 was Craft's breakout year by most accounts: the first Dot All conference in Portland, several industry awards, and the launch of Craft ID, the original license and plugin portal.

We were there for that first Dot All in Portland at a very fancy IMAX cinema, our first of many.

2018: Craft 3 and the Yii 2 rewrite

Three years and three months in the making, Craft 3 shipped April 4, 2018. It was rebuilt on Yii 2, requiring PHP 7, and distributed via Composer for the first time. The Plugin Store launched alongside it.

It was a serious technical achievement, but a hard one for the ecosystem. Every plugin had to be rewritten, the timeline ran years over, and there wasn't much new for content editors to show for it. P&T has been open about this since, it's the lesson that directly shaped how they're handling the Laravel move now.

We sponsored the second Dot All that year, in Berlin — a good distraction from the migration work most of us were buried in at the time.

Project Config, added in 3.1, was the quieter win: version-controlled config that finally made proper Git workflows across environments possible. In 2026 in the age of AI, this feels like a quiet innovation and has facilitated smarter development and safer deployments.

2019–2021: Plugins, Commerce, and the pandemic detour

The Craft Partner Network launched, giving clients a way to find agencies. Nitro arrived as a Craft-tuned local dev environment (later retired in favour of DDEV, which we still use today). P&T hired a dedicated accessibility engineer, who has continued to do excellent work in the Craft CMS.

Dot All 2020 was cancelled for COVID and Craft 4 was announced at Dot All 2021, alongside a bigger strategic change: a yearly release cadence going forward, with no more multi-year gaps between majors.

2022: Craft 4 and the Cloud roadmap

Craft 4 and Commerce 4 launched in May 2022, with Commerce going further on native integration. Dot All returned in person, where P&T announced Craft Cloud (serverless hosting built specifically for Craft) and Craft Console, the successor to Craft ID with team-based "Organisations."

A first-party Shopify integration also shipped this year, which we've used on a number of projects to great success. It gives you the power of Shopify, without having to be limited by Shopify's CMS constraints.

This is also when "entrification" began. A multi-year plan to fold categories, tags, global sets, and eventually Matrix blocks into a single, consistent entry concept.

2023–2024: Craft 5

2023 brought Craft 4.4 and 4.5, but most of P&T's effort went into Craft 5, which the team billed as the biggest content modelling leap since Matrix. November 2023 marked ten years since Craft 1.0.

Craft 5 launched in spring 2024, 692 days after Craft 4. There were tonnes of CMS improvements, entries gained multiple authors, entry types decoupled from sections, and the control panel got a visual refresh. Most agencies we know consider it the most ambitious Craft release to date. Craft Cloud also went live around this time.

We sponsored Dot One in London that year, where the move to Laravel was confirmed publicly for the first time — a year ahead of the full reveal at Dot All 2025.

2025: The Laravel announcement

At Dot All 2025 in Lisbon, P&T announced that Craft 6 would drop Yii 2 in favour of Laravel — by far the more popular PHP framework, with a much larger developer pool and package ecosystem.

Brandon Kelly didn't mince words: Yii 2 was a "dying horse" worth unhitching from.

What's different this time is how deliberately P&T is avoiding a repeat of Craft 3. It's described as a strict port rather than a refactor — the architecture (elements, fields, Matrix, the plugin system) stays as-is, only the underlying framework changes. A Yii 2 adapter package routes old API calls to their Laravel equivalents at runtime, so most existing plugins should keep working without a rewrite. And unlike Craft 3, this release ships with real author-facing features alongside the framework change: content releases, scheduled drafts, built-in approval workflows, entry-level commenting, and activity logs.

Craft 5 was also given Long-Term Support status which means it gains five years of support after Craft 6's full release, so nobody's forced to move quickly (or realistically, given the average lifespan of a site - at all!)

2026: Where things stand

Craft 6 is currently in alpha. The public roadmap, as it stands:

• Alpha — early/mid 2026, for developers and plugin authors to start testing <- we are here
• Beta — Q3 2026, feature-complete, roughly three months
• General availability — Q4 2026

Craft 5 remains the production-safe choice in the meantime, with support running into the 2030s.

Our own plan mirrors what we did during the 2-to-3 transition: test early in a sandbox, but wait for a few point releases past GA before putting Craft 6 into production.

The pattern, looking back

Across thirteen years, P&T has made a habit of large architectural bets, and we trust their judgement on these bets because they always play out to become a success.

We've migrated client sites through every one of these shifts, and we'll do the same through the move to Laravel.

If you're trying to work out what the Craft 6 timeline means for a site you're running on Craft 4 or 5 — or for a new build you're scoping now — happy to talk it through, hello@mutual.agency.