Looking Forward to Craft CMS 3
Craft CMS is a favorite of developers and designers because it’s engineered with careful attention to the needs of professionals who build complex content sites. At the beginning of 2017, the beta for Craft CMS 3 was released, bringing hundreds of changes and improvements.
When the Beta was released, Pixel & Tonic estimated that it’d take 6–9 months to work the kinks out, so it’s time to take a close look at what Craft enthusiasts can expect when Craft CMS 3 is production-ready.
Craft CMS 3 isn’t ready for primetime just yet, but if you want to test it, the beta can be downloaded from GitHub.
PHP 7 Required
Craft CMS 3 requires PHP 7. PHP 7 is much faster than previous PHP versions, includes numerous enhancements, and is more secure. Some Craft CMS users may not be pleased that they’ll be required to find hosting that supports PHP 7, but at this point, a hosting company that declines to update to the most recent version of PHP should be regarded with suspicion.
Hostdedi supports PHP 7 across our hosting products.
Image Editing
This is one of my favorite new features. Craft CMS 3 includes a built-in image editor with the most frequently used image transformations. Users can crop, rotate, and straighten photos. A nice touch is the ability to set focal points so that Craft knows which area of the image is most important when applying transformations.
Composer Compatibility
Composer — a tool for managing PHP dependencies — has become an essential part of the PHP workflow for many developers. They’ll be pleased to hear that with the release of Craft CMS 3, it will be possible to manage and install Craft and plugins with Composer.
Craft CMS Multi-site
In response to a developer hack that used Craft CMS’s Locales feature to create multiple sites, Craft 3 introduces a new feature that makes the creation of multiple sites from a single installation (and with a single license) much easier.
More Powerful Templates
Craft’s Twig templates are a key part of what makes the content management system so appealing to developers. Without having to tangle with the PHP innards of Craft, developers are able to quickly build beautiful, functional front-end themes using standard web languages.
With Craft 3, templates get a significant power-up, with the addition of access to Craft’s Application instance and its associated services and components.
Craft 3 includes more than 600 changes. It’s a major update, so developers will want to take some time to check out what’s different before the final release.
Hostdedi provides a wide range of Craft CMS hosting options with a technology stack engineered to offer the best possible content management and publishing experiences, including Craft shared hosting, dedicated servers, and custom clusters for high-traffic Craft CMS sites.
