Craft CMS is here

Live preview

Live preview is the main feature of this release. It lets you see exactly how your content will look on the site while you're still editing it. The editor, with all its fields, sits on the left, and the live website preview on the right, updating in real time as you type.

Anyone who has worked with other CMS will appreciate what this means in practice: no more saving a draft, opening a new browser tab, manually reloading the preview, going back to make changes, and starting the whole cycle again. Once you've used it, going back feels like a step backward.

What else is new

Craft 1.0 is more modular than the beta. Content, pages, categories, and users can be linked dynamically through a range of field types. There are 13 in total, covering everything from color pickers and checkboxes to number fields and file uploads. Each page and category can be built to exactly the structure the project requires. A powerful search function rounds things out.

Learning resources

For anyone coming to Craft fresh, Mijingo has put together a video series with Ryan Irelan covering the basics, including Twig templating, in about two and a half hours.

The official documentation is also worth working through prior to diving in. It covers the Control Panel, a Twig primer, and other fundamentals. The new buildwithcraft.com highlights key features and links to learning resources, and the updated releases page combines a history of past updates with a roadmap for what's coming next.

My take

Craft 1.0 is an impressive release, and the live preview alone sets it apart from most CMS on the market right now. After following the project since the Blocks days, it's satisfying to see it reach this milestone.

That said, Matrix is still nowhere to be found. Coming from ExpressionEngine, that stings a little. Client projects with complex content structures are a stretch without it, so for now Craft stays on my radar rather than in my toolkit.