In Lisbon, a few weeks back, Craft 6 was announced. At Dot All, the annual Craft CMS conference, there was big news. After months and even years of speculation, Craft is moving to Laravel.
Laravel is a hugely popular and successful PHP framework. Moving from Yii, which Craft is currently on, is a big move, but one that is likely to make Craft itself even more successful. For full details, please see the official Blog post.
So Laravel...
If you look at the Google Trends search above, you can see that Yii is dying and Laravel is on a lesser decline but still huge. Although a Google Trends search for "Yii" and "Laravel" shouldn't be seen as gospel, it gives a reasonable idea of usage and popularity.
Lessons learnt from previous upgrades of Craft
Pixel and Tonic, the makers of Craft, have "learned their lesson" with the problems of many moving from Craft 2 to Craft 3. That move was a similar scenario, when a major rewrite of Craft was undertaken. It then transitioned from Yii1 to Yii2, and now, with Craft 6, it is moving from Yii2 to Laravel. Brandon and the team have clearly evaluated the risk of the move and have come up with several solutions that should make the transition much easier for developers building Craft websites.
An adapter for Craft 5 plugins
The first one being that there is an adapter which existing plugins of version 5 will work out of the box with version 6 of Craft. This is a great move by the team and will make things significantly easier when people upgrade from Craft 5 to Craft 6. The other strategic move is to have a long support time for the current and existing version of Craft - version 5. Specifically, Pixel and Tonic are going to support version 5 for five years, which is a substantial time period which should see the most make the successful transition. In previous versions of Craft, the support period was typically around two to three years.
Time flies
In my experience running a small Craft Agency, two/three years comes around very quickly, and is there before you know it. With five years of support, however, that should be enough time to transition to the new version.
You may have heard of tales of sites still running Craft version 3 and even version 2 in the forums. This sounds bonkers, really, but a quite common scenario is a site being built by an agency, that agency then going out of business, and as the site is working perfectly now, the client, the small business, leaves that Craft version without updates on that neglected hosting there for years. This is definitely not something that I recommend at all, with two main reasons: 1. security and 2. new features. This post isn't about upgrading, but in short, with five years of support from Pixel and Tonic for Craft 5, it's a very sensible move by them.
So when?
That 5 years of support isn't from today, that 5 years from when Craft 6 is launched, which is targeted in Q4 2026, which really means that Craft 5 will be supported until 2032, and when you put it like that, it should be more than enough time!
New control panel aesthetic
Craft 6 will also have a new look control panel, which as a primarily a designer, I really look forward to seeing. Craft has always been a functional, more than beautiful design in the admin side of things. Maybe they have hired a talented design team to take the control panel look to a new level, or possibly it will just be a fresh lick of paint. Either way, I look forward to seeing it.
You can try Craft version 6... Right now!
Here's something that has gone a little under the radar, but you can check out Craft 6 running on Laravel today. Sure, it's an alpha developer release, which means there are likely to be substantial changes upon official release, but it's an option to try right now.
Any comments to add, please contact me on X/Twitter.
Written by John Macpherson