What site owners should know about Craft CMS 6

We've been keeping an eye on the announcements, and the work-in-progress releases to see what's on the horizon for Craft CMS with the upcoming release of 6.0.

The alpha arrived in May 2026. The beta has slipped from its original date, and Pixel & Tonic now say on the official Craft Discord that it's due in 2026. The full release follows the beta.

If you already have a Craft website, the main thing you should know is that Craft 5 is supported for years to come. It gets security fixes until 31 December 2031, so there's no rush to move.

Laravel

This is a geeky one, but bear with me. Craft has been built on a PHP framework called Yii since 2018. Craft 6 swaps that out for Laravel, which is the most widely used PHP framework in the world.

For you, that matters in two big ways. The pool of developers who can work confidently on your site gets considerably larger, given Laravel's size.

And when your site needs functionality Craft doesn't have out of the box, there's now a very large catalogue of well-maintained Laravel packages to draw on rather than building from scratch. Payments, queues, search, notifications, reporting: a lot of it already exists and is battle-tested.

Essentially, Craft is plugging in to the biggest and most mature ecosystem for PHP websites - unlocking new superpowers.

It's a port

Craft 6 is a port rather than a rewrite. This means that the way your content is structured, your entry types, your fields, your Matrix blocks and your templates all carry over.

There's a tool that automates most of the mechanical work, so the effort hopefully goes into checking everything behaves rather than reconstructing it - of course, this will need a lot of battle testing!

This, plus Craft 5's extended support makes for a comfortable situation for site owners.

What editors get

Six new features for the people writing content were announced in September 2025:

1. Content releases, so a batch of entries can go live together at a set time.
2. Scheduled drafts, for putting a single page live at a particular moment without anyone being at a desk.
3. A built-in content importer, which brings the time it takes to get a spreadsheet of content into the site down considerably.
4. Approval workflows, so a page can require sign-off before it publishes. This is the one regulated industries and larger teams have been asking for.
5. Comments in the content editor, so feedback happens in the CMS rather than across an email thread with screenshots attached.
6. An activity log per page, so you can see who changed what and when. Genuinely useful the next time someone asks why a price is different.

Some of these we've already extended Craft CMS with, as part of our Mutual One marketing platform that comes with our Craft CMS Support service, but it's great to see these become native capabilities in Craft and we'll work on ways to migrate to those.

That said, we've been following the alpha releases and so far only the importer has visible work behind it (that we've spotted).

The other five haven't appeared yet. There's every chance they're being built out of public view, and the beta is meant to be feature complete (not the alpha), but we wouldn't plan a 2026 project around approval workflows until we've seen them running.

I think it's also fair to assume that these features will come in Craft 6, but perhaps not all in Craft 6.0 and we certainly wouldn't be disappointed to see them put to later releases if they're done well.

Craft is also finishing a long-running tidy-up where categories, tags and global sets all become entries. For editors, that means fewer near-identical concepts to hold in heads and one consistent way of editing everything. We've been "entrified" on new sites for some time now, ready for this change.

An even more accessible control panel

The Craft control panel is being rebuilt, with dark mode and a proper mobile experience rather than a desktop interface squeezed onto a small screen. WCAG 2.2 is the accessibility target.

Better image handling

Craft 6 can now generate transforms from HEIC files, which is the format iPhones produce by default. It can also use libvips, a much faster image processing library than what Craft 5 supports.

When is Craft 6 out?

When we first wrote this, in August 2026, there had been fourteen alpha releases. Reading the work itself, the framework port and the control panel rebuild are clearly the priority, and the new editor-facing features are behind them - this is as expected for a replatform like this. Lay the foundations well, then build on top.

The plan was a beta in the third quarter and a full release by the end of the year. That's moved. The latest from Pixel & Tonic, on the official Craft Discord, is that the beta is due in 2026. There's no date for general availability yet, and as it follows the beta, we'd now expect it in 2027. (That last part is our reading, not an announcement.)

The delay doesn't worry us. Pixel & Tonic have been open that the whole point of doing it this way was to avoid repeating the Craft 3 upgrade, which ran years late, and we'd rather they got it right. With Craft 5 supported until the end of 2031, we're taking things slowly and won't be moving client sites on day one.

What this means for your site

On Craft 5: you're in a good spot. Keep applying patches, and look at Craft 6 once it has had a few point releases.

On Craft 4: Craft 4 reached end of life on 30 April 2026, so upgrade to Craft 5 now rather than waiting for 6. Going from 4 to 5 now and 5 to 6 later is easier than jumping straight to 6 while also dealing with deprecated Craft 4 features.

On Craft 3 or earlier: upgrade now. The longer you leave it, the harder the migration gets.

If you're writing custom code or plugins today, keep the Laravel move in mind.

All in all, Craft CMS 6 is shaping up nicely and we're really excited about the future of Craft, especially the adoption of Laravel.