Dot All 2025
Dot All 2025, the official Craft CMS conference, took place from 23 to 25 September in Lisbon. The venue was the Pátio da Galé, opened in 2011, in the center of the city next to the Praça do Comércio and right on the bank of the Tejo. Around 150 attendees heard the talks and participated in the workshops.
Work kept me from being there. For this article, I spoke to twelve attendees and followed every talk on the livestream. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
Lisbon Dot All was an amazing experience, with great speakers, fantastic food, and a fun after-party. And to top it off, the new Craft 6 changes look awesome!
Attendance was roughly the same as at Dot All 2023 in Barcelona, while the number of talks increased from 17 to 20. Day one was the workshop again. Day two ran two tracks, one on development and one on business. The final day opened with the State of Craft and continued with the remaining talks.
Anyone who saw the photos, or was there, can confirm what a conference like this is actually for: meeting the people behind the screen. One attendee told me a conference should inspire and motivate him, and that Dot All had managed exactly that. Another said Lisbon was beautiful and that it was great to talk to community members in person, because it is always worth finding out how other people work. What continues to strike me is how many different countries the attendees come from.
We were very, very happy with the event! We feel so fortunate to be able to bring together the community, and everything about this year's event we would consider a great success. (…) We had people attend from 6 out of the 7 continents, which I find pretty impressive!!!
Conferences like this are community building as much as anything else, and the community is still one of Craft's biggest advantages. Hopefully some new faces came out of it.
Dot All 2025 is a reminder to me about how truly special and unique our community is. The intelligence, inclusivity, and supportiveness among the attendees, the consistently high caliber talks, and the way we care for each other and our work represents the very best of the web. It's so damn inspiring and infectious and makes me excited to be a part of it.
State of Craft
Brandon Kelly used the State of Craft to give a full update on where Craft CMS stands and where it is heading.
Business
He started by looking back at the past year and at the business side. Diversifying revenue has been a goal at Pixel & Tonic for years: the acquisition of Market Commerce in 2015, which became Craft Commerce; the Craft Plugin Store in 2018; Craft Cloud last year. It is showing. Craft CMS licenses now account for slightly less than half of revenue. It used to be around 90%. The Plugin Store, Enterprise and the Partner Network sit at a similar level, with Cloud and Commerce just behind them. Paid support is far back, but it matters enormously to the platform, which is why Kelly singled out the support team leads, Oli Bon and Tommy Silver. They currently handle 600 support tickets a month, with an average first-response time of three hours.
Craft Cloud is available in Australia, Canada, Germany and the US, with the UK coming soon. Since August 2024, 150 paying projects have moved onto the service. Kelly is happy with the infrastructure, which handles 900 million requests a month and roughly 60 TB of data transfer.
Craft Commerce had several substantial updates over the past year, adding multi-store and multi-currency support, custom tax ID validation, and catalog pricing. Commerce 6 is in progress, and one of its new features will be authentication-based GraphQL queries.
Two people joined this year: Cloud Infrastructure Engineer Marco Deleu from Brazil, who has been working on Craft Cloud since February, and Rias Van der Veken from Belgium, who joined as a Senior Software Engineer in June. That brings headcount back to 17, the same as a few years ago. Pixel & Tonic is largely a remote company, and those 17 people are spread across ten countries: Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Indonesia, Japan, Poland, the UK and the US.
Business is pretty good. We've had consecutively higher revenue every single year. And this last year is definitely no exception. This is thanks a lot in part to Craft Cloud launching, and just revenue from license sales increasing. Ultimately, we're in a pretty good spot financially.
Community
Over the last twelve months, there have been Dot One events in Amsterdam, London, Toronto, and Melbourne. They went well enough that four or five new cities will follow next year. From now on, Dot One years and Dot All years alternate.
Several smaller events a year raise the odds that one of them lands near you, which means attending without a flight, and often without a hotel. For Pixel & Tonic, it is also a stage for showing off what's coming in the next dot release.
The digital community keeps growing too: the official Craft Discord now has over 8,200 members. There are 227 official partners, who have a partner network relaunch to look forward to, with a new landing page using Datastar for filtering and profile pages that will show more detail, including plugins in the Plugin Store and Dot One or Dot All talks given by staff.
The plugin ecosystem is still expanding. Pixel & Tonic has paid out 9 million US dollars to plugin developers, and that figure is what reached the developers, before Pixel & Tonic's own cut. So it is no surprise that there are now 631 Craft 5 plugins, covering 99.9% of the plugins people actually use.
Marketing, DevRel and documentation
Kelly admitted that marketing and DevRel are two areas where Pixel & Tonic hasn't done its best work, which makes hiring Travis Gertz as DevRel Engineer last year all the more welcome. Gertz has been around the community for years and has spoken at Dot Alls before. If you want to hear more about what he does, episode 22 of the podcast covers it. Gertz, Kenneth Ormandy, and Leah Stephenson make up the current marketing team. Since this year, they have been publishing official What's New articles to make it easier to sell an update to a client, and reworked versions of the same material go up on YouTube.
August Miller, Technical Writer at Pixel & Tonic, has kept improving the documentation. Search on the official Craft site now covers the docs as well. And craftiness.com will soon host a glossary explaining hundreds of Craft terms.
Accessibility
About five years ago, Pixel & Tonic decided to double down on accessibility. Lupe Camacho has done an enormous amount of that work and makes Craft more accessible every day. 548 issues have been fixed, eleven are in progress, and 161 are still waiting.
Craft 5.8 made the image editor partly keyboard-operable. In 5.9, focal points can also be set via keyboard, which would make it the first image editor in a CMS that can be used entirely without a mouse.
Craft CMS 5
Craft 5 has been Pixel & Tonic's largest update to date, and every release from 5.0 to 5.8 brought substantial improvements.
Next up is version 5 of the CKEditor plugin, with a fullscreen mode and a redesigned link modal that should behave more like Craft's own Link field.
Craft 5.9 is due shortly and is meant to complete the entrification process that started with 4.4 and has run through the 5.x line. All relation fields get an "Inline list" view mode, which makes Entries fields look the way Tags fields used to.
Multi-page entry indexes are coming as well. Pixel & Tonic heard from people who didn't want every setting and category living under Entries, since that area fills up fast. From 5.9 you can split entries across several pages, so the sidebar can have an Entries item under Content and, say, Taxonomies underneath it.
They also announced that Craft 5 will be an LTS release: it will be supported for five years after Craft 6 ships.
Craft CMS 6
The headline change in Craft 6 is the move to Laravel.
We think that moving to Laravel is gonna be much better for the Craft ecosystem in its entirety.
The good news is that this is a full port. Craft will be able to make use of everything Laravel offers, and of PHP 8.4, which becomes the new minimum. The structural change is that Craft becomes part of a Laravel app rather than a standalone app. Craft 6 will be handled inside Laravel as a service provider, and at that level modules and layer packages can be reused. Other applications, such as Statamic or Filament, could sit alongside it.
That is not a small move for a twelve-year-old piece of software with a plugin ecosystem this size. To make the transition easier, Pixel & Tonic is building a Yii 2 adapter package, a compatibility layer for plugins and modules written for Craft 5. The package contains all of Yii 2, which keeps every Craft CMS and Craft Commerce class available, rewritten as Laravel wrappers. Plugins keep working even if they haven't been ported yet. Performance is not expected to be an issue, and the adapter can simply be pulled in via Composer.
Laravel isn't the only thing coming:
- Content approval workflows
- Edit page commenting
- Element activity logs
- A completely new UI, with dark mode, better mobile support, WCAG 2.2 conformance and a Storybook-powered style guide
The schedule
- Alpha in Q1 2026. The Laravel port should be finished by then, after which the new features get built, which is expected to take around six months.
- Beta in Q3 2026
- GA in Q4 2026
Conclusion
The feedback was uniformly good, and the photos explain why. A conference that gets people from six continents into one room does more for a community than any feature release.
Which leaves the question of who can afford to be in that room. The conference cost €999, or €1,199 with the workshop; the early-bird rate was €799 and €999. Add a flight and a hotel in Lisbon. The livestream I used cost €299.
That it exists at all is a good thing. Lisbon was too far for me, and without the stream I couldn't have written this. The price still stands out. Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin costs €349 for two days in November, or €299 early-bird, and streaming access is included with the ticket. The two events aren't directly comparable, and I don't know the cost structure for either. But for what I paid to watch, I could have been in the room in Berlin.
Pixel & Tonic sees the problem, and the answer was in the announcement itself.
And the hope is that with the Dot Ones happening every other year, our events are a little more accessible to the broader community.
That is the right direction. Four or five Dot Ones a year mean a lot of people can attend without booking a hotel, and they give Pixel & Tonic a stage for what's coming. They don't replace Dot All, though. The State of Craft, with the Craft 6 schedule in it, happened there and nowhere else.
And that schedule is the real outcome of this conference. Alpha in Q1 2026, beta in Q3, GA in Q4, plus the commitment to support Craft 5 for five years after Craft 6 arrives. That takes the pressure off the upgrade, and with a full port to Laravel ahead, it is not a small promise.
Webentwickler