I came across Josh a good few years back because of his brilliant work with SuperTable, which was a Craft plugin that turbocharged Matrix. It's now deprecated because in version 5, the functionality was built into Craft natively.
Since then, he has become the most prolific Craft plugin developer with a whopping 61 plugins available on the plugin store. This guy knows his Craft CMS!
In last weeks blog I covered the Craft 6 move to Laravel, but it's great to talk to the people that extend Craft, the plugin developers.
I was delighted to be able to ask him some questions about the move to Laravel.
Q1: What is your initial reaction to Craft moving to Laravel?
We’ve collectively known about their decision for some time (I believe since Dot All 2022 Brooklyn) so, we’ve had some time to process it. I think it’s amazing, and in particular the thought and care put in by the P&T team on addressing their past “mistake” with the Craft 3 upgrade process. While pretty unavoidable - and we’re all better for it in the long run - having the Yii adapter to essentially keep plugins as-is, indefinitely, is a big win for developers and clients.
Having some new features is also a good to see thing, where they’re clearly listening to the community when it comes to selling Craft updates to clients.
Q2: What are the advantages of moving to Laravel over Yii?
I think being part of the Laravel ecosystem is a pretty exciting thought. Not to mention, as module or plugin developers, we’ve essentially learnt Yii, which isn’t exactly the most sought-after skill in the industry. Instead, I’d personally much rather invest in learning Laravel, arguable the go-to framework for PHP these days. For any developer that doesn’t yet know Laravel, it’ll be a great additional skill to add to your resume!
Not to mention all the performance, and DX improvements that come with Laravel as well, and keeping up with the modern web.
Q3: How much work will it be for you to port over your plugins to Craft 6?
We couldn’t possibly estimate at this stage, but with 60+ plugins, it might take a bit! But the great thing about the transition will be that there’s not a massive, immediate need to port plugins to Laravel. Plugins will continue to work as-is, with the Yii adapter. So it’s really a case of slowly moving some of our larger, more complicated plugins to the “Laravel-Craft-way” as required. But of course, we’re not even at an alpha stage yet for Craft 6, which is coming in 2026, so we’ll see! We’re always up for a challenge.
Q4: Will you be using the adapter for any of your plugins?
Sure! The ultimate goal is to not use it, but if there’s smaller plugins we’re just simply unable to get to by Craft 6 launch, we’ll be no worse off.
Q5: Any other thoughts about Craft 6?
I’m particularly excited about the new control panel UI, and the web components direction they’re taking. This will essentially replace Garnish and the jQuery “legacy” JS in the control panel. And a refined design system built from the ground-up is refreshing as well, particularly for accessibility. Craft’s been around for a while now, and it’s clear to see what things have been “tacked on” over the years.
Many thanks to Josh for answering my questions and check out his fabulous array of Craft CMS plugins on Verbb.
Written by John Macpherson