Craft CMS 3 Beta

The first preview appeared at the Craft CMS Summit in 2014, and there was a Developer Preview in May 2015. After that, there wasn't much news. I sometimes wondered if the project had stopped, since waiting almost two years between the first preview and the beta is a long time for a CMS update. Now that the beta is out, it really feels like we've been waiting forever.

The beta will likely last six to nine months and isn't ready for live sites yet. Still, the main features are already there.

Yii 2 and PHP 7

Craft 3 is now built on Yii 2 and requires at least PHP 7. At first, it was supposed to support PHP 5.4, but the requirements changed as PHP moved forward. Because of this, Craft 3 should be two to three times faster than Craft 2.

Multi-site

Multi-site was one of the most requested features from the community. Before, you could only manage several websites from one Craft install by using the language feature as a workaround, but that didn't really work for multilingual multi-site setups.

Craft 3 now has multi-site built in. You can run several sites that share the same content base, but each one can have its own templates, domains, and languages. This is a big improvement for agencies that manage several related sites for a client.

Image editor

Asset editing is better now. You can crop images directly in the control panel and set focal points, so image transforms always focus on the most important part of the picture.

Plugins

The plugin system has been totally rebuilt. Plugins are now Yii modules with their own namespace and can be installed with Composer. This gives plugin developers a cleaner structure and better fits with modern PHP workflows. However, plugins made for Craft 2 will need to be rewritten for Craft 3, so the community will have a transition period.

More additions

A few new features developers will appreciate:

• Debug toolbar – a comprehensive toolbar for faster debugging directly in the browser
• Composer support – Craft 3 can be installed and managed via the Composer package manager
• Content migrations – structural changes like new fields or sections can be versioned as migrations and transferred to other environments

My take

Craft 3 has finally reached beta after a long development process. Features like Yii 2, PHP 7, multi-site, and content migrations are not just surface changes. They are major updates. I had my doubts during the wait, but now that I see all the changes, I understand why it took so long. The beta will show if the community is ready to make the switch.