Craft 5 recently landed, and it is a content authoring experience designer’s dream. What Pixel & Tonic have managed to pull off in Craft 5 is truly remarkable. So in case you were wondering whether you should already be using it, the answer is, absolutely!
Craft’s new features page hightlights some of the major new functionality. My personal favourite is the the ability to model entry types, nested entries, and fields, all within slideouts. This makes what used to be a tedious task of opening multiple tabs and going through the modelling process “in reverse”, much more intuitive.
Previously, it was necessary to create fields before being able to assign them to field layouts in entry types. Now, in a single browser tab, you can create a section, an entry type and its fields, all while staying in context the entire time.
Plugin Roadmap #
All of our plugins are now available as stable versions for Craft 5 🎉
One notable exception is Blitz Recommendations, which has been discontinued. If you already use Blitz, then the Hints utility will continue being available. Alternatively, you can use the free Elements Panel plugin, which displays eager-loading opportunities in its own panel in the debug toolbar.
The reason for discontinuing Blitz Recommendations is that eager-loading has become so much easier and better in Craft 5 with the introduction of lazy eager-loading. I suggest you watch this CraftQuest livestream on using .eagerly(), to see how it works.
Blitz Cloud Adapter #
Craft Cloud is still in private testing, but a public release should be around the corner. To help prepare, we’re testing our plugins and marking them as compatible (or not) in the plugin store.
We also just released the Blitz Cloud Adapter, that allows Blitz to seamlessly work with sites running on Craft Cloud! While Cloud comes with a static cache, it is not nearly as customisable nor powerful as the caching strategies that Blitz offers. And with this Blitz-Cloud adapter, you now have a choice.
Sprig Update #
Sprig, the reactive Twig component framework for Craft, added some new variables and removed some deprecated ones in version 3. If you are using it with Craft 5 then please check out the changelog.
Also, if you use and enjoy Sprig then please help us out by starring the GitHub repo or, if you could benefit from it, purchasing a training video.
