Craft CMS 6 announcement

Craft CMS 6 was recently announced at the Dot All Conference in Lisbon and the headline news is that Craft is migrating to Laravel. Laravel is perhaps the leading PHP framework and comes with a massive ecosystem of packages, services and add-ons which Craft will now be able to use. This opens up further opportunities for website owners, content creators and developers.

A seamless transition

Migrating to Craft 6 won't be like the infamous Craft 2 to 3 transition which introduced breaking changes and required plugins to be completely rewritten. This time, Pixel & Tonic are doing a strict port to Laravel without changing the underlying architecture. This means that working in Craft 6 will feel very familiar to Craft developers.

The new software will also be backwards compatible with Craft CMS 5 via a new adapter package. This means that existing plugins and modules written for Craft 5 will continue to work without further changes.

New author experience

As well as opening up the huge Laravel ecosystem, Craft 6 will introduce a number of author experience features;

• Content releases that publish multiple entries at once, either manually or at a scheduled time

• A new built-in importer tool to make working with data easier

• Content approval and governance workflows that control how entries get published

• Improved activity logs to see a timeline of changes

• New admin UI with dark mode support

• First-class mobile experience

• WCAG 2.2 accessibility compliance

Release schedule

In terms of timing, developer previews of Craft 6 will be available in Q1 2026. The Beta is expected in Q3 of 2026 and a general availability (GA) release following in Q4. 

Finally, Pixel & Tonic have announced LTS (long term support) for Craft 5. This means they will continue to support and maintain Craft 5 for five years after Craft 6 is fully released. This gives plenty of time for website owners and developers to transition to Craft 6 and Laravel on their own terms.

It’s an exciting time to work within the Craft CMS ecosystem and here at Cursor, we are planning to start experimenting with Craft 6 as soon as the Beta is released. This way we can hit the ground running and offer the benefits of Craft 6 to clients following its public release in Q4 2026.

Find out more: https://craftquest.io/lessons/what-you-need-to-know-about-craft-6-on-laravel