What site owners should know about Craft CMS 6
The next major version of Craft CMS is being made as we speak. But what's going to be inside it for site owners to know?
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, a beta is due this quarter, and a full release is planned for the end of the year.
If you already have a Craft website, the main thing you should know is that Craft 5 is supported for years to come. Craft 6 is a big re-write, so they're adding 5 more years to Craft 5's support from the release of Craft 6.
Laravel
This is a geeky one, but bare 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 last September:
- Content releases, so a batch of entries can go live together at a set time.
- Scheduled drafts, for putting a single page live at a particular moment without anyone being at a desk.
- A built-in content importer, which brings the time it takes to get a spreadsheet of content into the site down considerably.
- 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.
- Comments in the content editor, so feedback happens in the CMS rather than across an email thread with screenshots attached.
- 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 it's 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 disapointed 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.
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.
Where we are right now
As of writing, in August 2026, we've had 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.
Beta is expected this quarter and general availability is planned for Q4. Pixel & Tonic have a good record on shipping, and they've been open that the whole point of doing it this way was to avoid repeating the Craft 3 upgrade, which ran years late. We'd still treat Q4 as the earliest realistic date rather than a firm one and because Craft 5's long term support we are taking things slow and not planning for Craft 6 adoption from day-1.
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.
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.
