Craft 5 brings significant enhancements across the board, from the authoring experience to content modeling and developer experience. It marks our most extensive update yet.
Here’s a glimpse of what’s new:
Authoring:
Refined UI: The control panel has been revamped for a lighter, crisper, and more user-friendly experience. Featuring a new icon set, collapsible global sidebar, and improved breadcrumbs.
- Element Cards: Element indexes and relational fields now display elements as cards with large thumbnails and customizable content previews.
- Entry Type Icons and Colors: Inject some color into your control panel with customizable icons and colors for each element type.
- Element Action Menus: Access common actions like editing elements directly from element chips, cards, and slideouts.
- Bulk Inline Editing: Inline editing support for all visible elements in element indexes.
- Matrix Enhancements: Full support for tabs, UI elements, and conditions in Matrix fields.
- Live Conditions: Live condition support for user edit pages and inline-editable Matrix blocks.
- 2FA and Passkeys: Enhance account security with two-step verification and passkeys for quicker logins.
Content Modeling:
- Matrix in Matrix: Nested entries support in Matrix fields, allowing for limitless content nesting.
- Nested Entries for CKEditor: Create nested entries directly within rich text content using the updated CKEditor plugin.
- Decoupled Entry Types: Entry types can now be created independently of sections for increased reusability.
- Matrix View Modes: Customize author interactions with Matrix fields with inline-editable blocks, cards, or embedded element indexes.
- Field Instances: Multiple instances of custom fields with unique settings can now be included in the same layout.
- Multiple Authors: Sections can now have multiple authors with a configurable “Max Authors” setting.
- Addresses Fields: Create custom address fields and attach them wherever needed for managing nested addresses.
- Inline Entry Type and Field Creation: Streamlined workflow for creating sections, entry types, and custom fields in one go.
Administration and Development:
- Lazy Eager-Loading: Simplified eager-loading for nested elements with the .eagerly() method.
- Element Partial Templates: Render collections of elements efficiently with partial templates.
- Reusable Filesystems: Volumes can now share filesystems with unique subpaths.
- Field Type Icons: Field types now feature icons for easier recognition.
- PHP 8.2 and utf8mb4: Craft 5 requires PHP 8.2 and defaults to utf8mb4 encoding for MySQL installs.
- Content JSON Column: Most custom field content is now stored in a central JSON column, addressing MySQL table size limitations.
Explore Craft 5 Beta now to experience these enhancements firsthand! All information and images are taken from: https://craftcms.com/blog/craft-5-beta-released
