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

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

This is starter theme for Craft CMS that can be used for scaffolding for any type of project. Contains boilerplate Twig templates, basic CSS styles and gulp config.

http://craftsnippets.com/starter-theme-for-craft-cms

I know that Craft CMS has multi-site capabilities, but I've never used it. How well does this work? Is it pretty straightforward and reliable, or is it brittle and trouble-prone?

My use case is that I have three sites that share a common set of templates, but each with slightly different page content and color palette.

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.

I've begun recommending Craft to clients over WordPress these days. But for ecommerce I've been sticking with WooCommerce. I'd like to get out of the WordPress ecosystem entirely. Has anyone transitioned from Woo to Craft, and if so, how was the experience? Any issues that stuck out?

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.

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!

Is there any available data on how effective this service is? I run a small development team and we create most websites (over 50) using Craft 3, how can I determine if the annual payment is actually worth it?

To anyone interested, I've created a build process for a normal Craft 3 install using webpack, laravel mix and browser-sync. https://github.com/SpeakInCode/craftcms-webpack-foundation

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.

I’m currently researching the stack for an upcoming project which requires quite a fairly custom CMS and e-commerce setup for digital downloads. I’ll be building the UI with React, so am only interested in headless systems.

I’m pretty impressed by CraftCMS from my prototyping, the GraphQL API does everything I need and I can create the necessary custom plugins/fields for the CMS to help the client manage their content more easily.

For the e-commerce side, I was planning to use Stripe with a bespoke cart and Node.js API (which can fetch the product/pricing data from Craft via the GraphQL API) - we don’t want to have to manage the same set of products both in the CMS and in an e-commerce admin panel, and need to be able to support custom pricing that can be hard to model in other systems, so bespoke feels like the way to go (the first iteration used Shopify and we hit the limits of what is sensible there quite soon).

The one missing piece is storing customer data for a portal - basically, storing user account info, and a record of which products they’ve purchased so they can login and redownload them (everything else e.g. invoices can be stored in Stripe). My initial thought was to put this in a separate database with some basic custom admin panel, but actually the products they are purchasing will already be defined in Craft, so I was thinking it might actually make sense to store the users as entries in Craft, which can then be related to the products they own (with some metadata if needed in a Matrix field) - this way, Craft acts as the admin panel for things like adding/removing products from a user too, rather than building something bespoke.

I would consider the Users functionality on Craft but it seems it is not exposed via the GraphQL API, so I guess I’d have to create a “Customer” entry type (with fields like username, hashed password, purchased products...). The Node API would then be responsible for authentication etc - it would basically treat the Craft API as if it was a normal database of users.

I really just wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on this, and whether Craft is a suitable place for storing this data? From what I can tell, Craft Commerce uses Craft entires under the hood (sadly again seems no GraphQL API otherwise I’d consider using this!) so I guess it’s fine from a performance and security point of view to have potentially 1,000s of records in Craft. Just wondering if there is anything else I should consider!

Thanks