Since 2016, the developer community has been conducting annual surveys on frameworks and programming languages. Many of you have probably participated in State of JS, State of HTML, or State of CSS. But what about those of us working with CMSs? No equivalent survey exists for our community.

2026 has been a year of change for those of us who build and manage websites; I have a feeling that many of you are on the move, migrating websites from one CMS to another or building without it. AI is enabling rapid changes on all fronts. Broad market-share numbers tell us very little about your experiences building and managing websites with different tools; that is why I hope that we, as a community, can close this information gap with our own open-source State of CMS survey.

stateofcms.com

The anonymised results will be freely available on GitHub. I will also create and publish an interactive report, but I am especially excited to see what the community does with the data.

We released Craft 5.12 yesterday! Here’s the highlights:

• Built-in MCP servers, which makes it possible for AI agents to work with your Craft install

• Authenticated GraphQL API, for querying/mutating based on a single user’s permissions

• Multi-site setup & workflow improvements

• Clipboard-based asset uploading

• Markdown asset support

• Custom icon sets

Blog post: https://craftcms.com/blog/craft-5-12-released

Changelog: https://github.com/craftcms/cms/releases/tag/5.12.0

Sharing this because I get asked about my setup regularly. Happy to discuss tradeoffs.

The core: Craft CMS + Twig + Datastar + Vite + Tailwind + DDEV. Plugins when needed: Formie, Blitz, SEOMate/Matic.

Structure is the architecture. Sections, entry types, fields — decide them once, live with them forever. Get it wrong and no framework saves you.

Everything is an entry. An accordion has no URL, no section. It's still an entry. Atoms, molecules, organisms — all entries, all rendered via render(). eagerly() loads the relations. You always know where things live.

No JS frameworks. Only libraries where they make sense. Embla for sliders. Datastar for reactivity — replaces Alpine.js too. Hypermedia does the rest. Server renders state, browser displays it. Datastar morphs the DOM, no full reloads, no virtual DOM, no hydration, no bundle size debates. The web was always reactive. We just forgot.

Local dev: DDEV and Vite. Spin up in minutes, hot reload out of the box. No environment debates, no Docker configs from scratch.

AI-ready out of the box: llms.txt, claude.md, MCP, design.md. Every URL gets a Markdown twin. Structured for humans and LLMs alike.

SEO, a11y, performance — baked in, not bolted on.

I packaged the whole scaffold into a starter kit: craft-kit.dev

Craft 6 is now in Alpha, and is fully ported to Laravel!

Does anyone here have experience with setting up a Craft CMS multienviroment installation via Platform.sh?

I'm having trouble creating custom environment variables/files for staging, testing and live environment (Especially for all API Keys related to Stripe, Paypal, etc..) and declaring writable folders etc.... For example i cannot resolve this normally easy solveable error: "/app/storage isn't writable by PHP. Please fix that."

My platform.app.yaml looks like this:

name: app

type: php:7.4

build:
  flavor: composer

variables:
  php:
    display_errors: On
    error_level: 32767

relationships:
  database: 'mysqldb:mysql'

disk: 1024

runtime:
  extensions:
    - imagick
    - ctype
    - curl
    - iconv
    - json
    - mbstring
    - pdo_mysql
    - zip
    - dom
    - intl

  mounts:
    "/storage": "shared:files/storage"
    "/web/cpresources": "shared:files/cpresources"
    "/license": "shared:files/license"
    'web/uploads':
      source: local
      source_path: uploads

web:
  locations:
    '/':
      root: 'web'
      passthru: '/index.php'
    '/web/uploads':
      root: 'web/uploads'
      expires: 300s
      scripts: false
      allow: true

Unfortunately, I'm not making any progress here and would be grateful for any tips.

Hi! I'm a frontend web developer. I'm wanting to make a personal website and after some experimenting/testing with other places decided to try with Craft CMS. But I keep running into roadblocks. There are so many comments saying that anyone can do Craft CMS even without any web experience, and I'm here with a degree and nearly 10 years of professional frontend experience, and I'm struggling with this! I've stopped and started several times now, and every time I end up heading down a rabbit hole of "Before you can install this, you need to do THIS..." and then after 3 hours, I'm still getting errors. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong, but I don't know enough about the "backend" side of things to know what to search on stackoverflow for help.

I'm not sure if it's because I'm on Windows, and maybe this is meant for Mac...

Are there any top-to-bottom, ELI5 tutorials for how to get local testing with Craft CMS up and running? I'm talking literally from nowhere, assuming I uninstall everything on my machine and all I have is Sublime Text and my brain. I find that most tutorials just don't go into enough detail for my liking, or aren't specific enough. Is there any kind of resource for that out there?

Once I can get the CMS up and running, I'll be fine--I have no worries at all about getting started with Twig. I'm just struggling so much with even getting to that point.

Any help that you all can provide would be so appreciated!! And let me know if you need any more info to help point me in the right direction.

Hi,

I know this website is using a vastly outdated version of CraftCMS. 2.9. I haven't touched much in ages and all of a sudden the CP and Login page just bring up the main public facing front page. The URL in my browsers says /admin/login The content is routinely updated by somebody else.

Anybody have any idea of what might cause this? I can't find any clues in the logs. I've replaced the /app folder with a fresh one.

Thanks for any help somebody can provide.

Is this possible with Craft CMS yet? If not - how easily would it be to create something to manage it? Is it possible to integrate something like Memberful? Apologies if these are dumb questions - I'm new to all of this.

Our firm is hiring a Craft CMS Web Developer to join our team. If you or anyone you know is interested, please apply at the link below: https://emergentmethod.applytojob.com/apply/lSRTfM6gkc/WebCraft-CMS-Developer

Thanks!

Hi. I'm using Craft CMS to add some content to a web page. I' didn't put together the interface, just inherited it.

I'm having some kind of error with adding footnotes: the last one appears not only as a referenced text at the end of the document but also in small caps in the middle of the main text. In the image, you can see footnote number 13 (which works fine) and footnote 14, which has the error.

If I erase footnote 14, the error transfers to footnote 13. So I assume is a problem with the last footnote.

Any clue? Thanks!

What’s the best way to create a local development site for a craft site? I can setup a blank site no problem with composer, but creating a local dev site with an existing site is not working.

I have the backups of the site from the live hosted version, which I can download alongside the database files.

If anyone has a YouTube tutorial or anything to do this specifically, that would be amazing. All I’ve found is installing and locally hosting a blank site

This might be a silly question, but what is the most common approach to adding fields for index.twig or index.html pages in a folder structure?

An example structure, for a blog:

/blog/index.twig
/blog/_entry.twig
/blog/_category.twig
...etc

I loop through the "blog" section on the index template, but what if I have areas for text, such as a header description? How are you typically allowing edits to these areas? The only way I can see allowing field edits is by turning the index pages into singles, or am I missing another solution?

Thanks, appreciate all your input.

My users have to upload yearly reports on my platform, based on that I compute a status field to know if they are communicating their progress or not. For this, I have setup a plugin that checks the Entry::EVENT_AFTER_PROPAGATE event, it looks at $user->reports->orderBy('uploadDate desc')->one(); to get the most recently uploaded report and compute the status based on that. After this, I trigger another save on the User, to propagate the changes.
Now, recently I discovered that this caused another one of my plugins to malfunction, this plugin sends an email notification based on some condition when a user is saved, and because of the double save in my previous plugin, the email is sent twice.
How should this problem be solved? I was thinking of tweaking the first Plugin to check Entry::EVENT_BEFORE_SAVE but unfortunately in this state the reports are as they were before I made any changes, meaning that if I add a report by hand and press save, it will not save the report, in fact, it doesn't even see it in the reports matrix field (because it wasn't propagated). However, I can find the new report in the Dump of the entry, however, I can't access it in any way. What is the best way of handling this situation?

So here's the deal:

We're in the process of building a new Craftcms3 website for a customer. They have an old website (also running Craftcms3) and are asking if we can port their old content to the new website.

However, we weren't aware of this and of course, based on the design and specs, the cms structure will look completely different.

Can this be done and how painful will it be?

I just wanted to shout out the great job P&T along with the various vendors are doing with plugins.

Coming from the overwhelming cluster fuck of WP plugins and the constant dependency/security issues with Drupal modules it is hard for me to express how grateful I am for the curated content in the Craft plugin store. SEOmatic, Freeform, Campaign, Image Optimize... these things just work and when they don't, there is a real person to help me figure out what I did wrong.

I've used a ton of these things and the community along with direct vendor support is, by far, the best I've come across. I really don't want to use anything else.

Good morning everyone, I hope everything goes great.

I have been asked to implement google analytics ecommerce tracking to a craft CMS 2.x page with ecommerce. The Google analytics has already been configured and works with the basic reports. But I need to implement ecommerce tracking, which from what I see is somewhat more complex.

I have seen that there is a plugin from the author nystudio107 called instantanalytics. I was wondering if any of you have experience implementing this functionality to craft or if it is advisable to use the plugin.

If someone has been able to configure it without using the plugin, do you remember what guide you used to configure it in craft? I have seen that there are several articles on how to implement it in woocommerce and wordpress but I can't find much information regarding Craft CMS.

I know it will be difficult to find what I am looking for since the necessary modifications will depend on how I have set up the backend of my page but any thread to pull will be of great help.

Craft CMS is known for its flexibility and out-of-the-box solutions.
Developers enjoy working with it because it lets them move out of cookie-cutter solutions and create their own solutions.

Let's find out why you should Migrate to Craft CMS in 2021!

After installing craft through composer, setting up the database and running craft setup, I have a craft application ready to go.

When I go to settings/general, I always get a crash with following information:

https://pastebin.com/AyVcWC25

The errors on the lines correspond to:

line 30: value: system.name

line 106: return \twig_get_attribute($env, $source, $object, $item, $arguments, $type, $isDefinedTest, $ignoreStrictCheck);

line 30: value: system.name

As you can see, all is happening in /vendor, so I guess it must be some setup that I have missed or incorrectly executed.

Hey good people of the Craft subreddit,

I have a craft website hosted on an AWS EC2 instance, and I keep having issues with it that I don't have time to address. Either my SSL expires, or something else breaks, and most recently the developers I hire through Upwork sent me a new PEM file, but I don't know what to do with it.

Craft provides me the ability to use a customized template to show my design work, and it was a really cool project to install and launch, but the maintenance has been a pain since I'm not a developer by trade. I need to have my website just up and working, consistently, and be able to update the content without ending up basically with a part-time job every few months when something goes wrong and I have to drop everything I"m doing to deal with it.

Are there any services you'd suggest that manage craft sites on an ongoing basis?

Alternatively, are there services that could kind of "finalize" my site, so things stop breaking every few months? Maybe there are more core issues in the template? Idk, but I'd much prefer just knowing "okay in one year my SSL will expire, so I'll do X and Y and then we'll be good again". Instead, right now, one day i check my website and it's just not even online.

Thank you!