Craft is one of Imarc’s core Content Management System (CMS) offerings that we recommend for small businesses and large enterprises alike. It is affordable, customizable, and it comes with a strong built-in feature set and an extensive library of plugins that expand its already robust capabilities.
On March 26, 2024, Pixel and Tonic released Craft 5, its most full-featured and innovative upgrade yet.
Imarc was so excited about this new release that we upgraded our own site, Imarc.com, to Craft 5 as soon as we could to be fully prepared to roll out upgrades to all of our Craft clients.
Benefits of Craft 5 & how you can take advantage of them
Pixel and Tonic has made a huge number of changes to Craft’s editing experience, features, and back-end. Here are just a few we’re excited about.
Improved authoring experience
User experience (UX) in the CMS
Craft 5 has made the overall experience more flexible and comfortable. Menus and sidebars can now collapse to let you focus on the editing screen. Editing entries and matrixes from within other matrixes has never been easier. Simply double-click on an element you want to edit and multiple panes open up:
Matrixes
Craft matrixes and similar plugins make up the bulk of the editing experience on most of our pages. We call this the “content designer” or sometimes “modules” or “blocks,” and it allows our clients’ content editors and marketers to create flexible pages from carefully designed blocks. By adding a combination of these blocks to a page, a client can quickly create unique landing pages and blog pages, or make updates to the homepage without needing a developer to get involved.
However, this has historically meant long, hard-to-navigate editing screens in the CMS. Craft 5 adds a number of changes to improve the experience. Color-coding different matrix blocks or modules makes it easy to see the boundaries of the various blocks and know where you are on the page. Craft 5 also makes icons available for each block so you know at a glance what kind of block it is.
Note: Imarc has also developed a Table of Contents plugin that makes it easier to navigate these pages, and is available to all of our clients on request.
Craft matrixes can now be fully nested, meaning that plugins like SuperTable and Neo may not be needed to enable more complex types of content. Also, matrixes can now use tabs, so block settings, like anchor links, or style choices, can be hidden to make the editing screen shorter.
Entry flexibility
Craft has made entry types much more flexible in Craft 5. Entry types can now be used in more than one section and moved easily between sections. This means that if you change your sitemap, it’s simple to rearrange the site without involving a developer.
Entries can be edited on the listing screen, so you can make many changes without opening an entry.
Fresh features
Among the new features we’re most excited about is the ability to nest entries within rich text blocks. This has the potential to give your pages more variety and make it easier to reuse content.
Craft 5 also enables multi-factor authentication for editors out of the box, rather than requiring a separate plugin and integration. That’s a big win for straightforward security.
Updated database schema
Craft has changed how it stores content in the database to make it faster to query, and more scalable. This means larger sites are at less risk of database corruption, and accessing the data is faster, so pages load quicker both in Craft and on the front-end.
Migration
The right time to migrate is when your website is between major projects, and you can tolerate a content freeze for a day.
Preparation
To prepare for an upgrade, Imarc will:
- Make sure that your live site is on Craft 4, running the latest version.
- Inventory your plugins and ensure they are available for upgrade to Craft 5. If not, we will find workarounds, or, if the upgrade is simple, create a branch of a plugin and upgrade it.
- Review custom code and plugins to confirm they can be upgraded to Craft 5
- Check that the site and server is running at least PHP 8.2 and the appropriate database versions.
Performing the upgrade
We always perform the upgrade in a non-production environment first so we can be positive that the upgrade itself completes without errors, and then we test the upgraded site. The steps are:
- Upgrade Craft and all of the plugins.
- Run the migration scripts.
- Run a database conversion (Craft 5 uses an updated character set).
- Perform any additional plugin-specific migrations. For example, SuperTable fields will all be converted to matrixes in Craft 5, requiring a separate script to be run.
Test & release
The next step is to test the upgraded site thoroughly, making sure all of the front-end pages load without errors and appear as expected. It is also important to test any custom modules, and that the editing experience in Craft 5, including any plugins, operate as expected.
Even if your production site is set up for deploys without downtime, Imarc recommends doing a blue/green deploy for the upgrade to Craft 5, following a set of steps similar to these:
- Designate an environment as the temporary live site during the upgrade. Imarc frequently uses UAT (User Acceptance Testing) environments for this purpose.
- Inform business units of a 24-hour content freeze.
- Direct all web traffic from the production site (usually the www site) to the designated environment.
- Upgrade the production site to Craft 5.
- Verify that the production site is up and working.
- Redirect web traffic to the newly upgraded production site.
What’s coming next
Craft 5 is fairly new, and Pixel and Tonic has a comprehensive and frequently updated product roadmap to show what’s on the horizon.
Some things we’re looking forward to that aren’t on the roadmap as of this article, but P&T has hinted at:
- Setting draft publication dates – This will mean that a draft can be created and will automatically be published when the date occurs.
- Nesting existing entries in rich text blocks – Currently, only new entries can be added to rich text blocks, but nesting existing entries would allow even more flexibility and sharing content like Calls To Action across many pages.
- Bulk editing – Right now, in Craft 5, an editor can edit some fields from the entry listing. Bulk editing would allow these fields to be edited simultaneously, for instance adding a new category to a large number of blog posts.
How can you get your site upgraded to Craft 5?
If you’re an existing Imarc client, just contact your Account Manager. They’ll get everything set to go. And if you’re someone new to Imarc, we’d be happy to scope the project and evaluate your current site for readiness. Just say hello.
