Craft CMS in the Fast Lane: Dot All 2025 Marks the Leap to Laravel and Enterprise Features

In September 2025, the international Craft CMS community gathered in Lisbon for this year’s Dot All conference.
The central theme: With the move to Laravel and a range of enterprise features, Craft CMS is evolving toward future-proofing, developer friendliness, and maximum accessibility.

1. The Foundation: Stable Core and Growing Community

In his keynote “State of Craft,” Brandon Kelly, CEO of Pixel & Tonic, confirmed the ongoing success story of the still independent Craft CMS. The community continues to grow, now counting over 8,200 members on Discord, and plugin sales have surpassed several million dollars annually. This solid economic and organizational foundation allows the Craft team to initiate the biggest architectural shift in the system’s history.

2. The Milestone: Craft 6 Fully Migrates to Laravel

The most groundbreaking announcement of the conference was the complete framework migration from Yii2 to Laravel with Craft CMS 6. Laravel is currently the most popular PHP framework. This change is strategic and opens Craft CMS to a much broader ecosystem of packages, services, and developer expertise. Importantly for developers, this transition will be a full port, with Craft 6 running as a dependency inside a standard Laravel application. To ease the transition for existing projects, a Yii 2 adapter will be provided as a Composer package, ensuring compatibility for Craft 5 plugins with minimal effort. Craft 6 will also require PHP 8.4.

3. Planning Reliability: Five Years of Long-Term Support for Craft 5

To ensure maximum planning reliability for agencies and companies, Craft 5 will, for the first time, be declared an LTS (Long-Term Support) version, supported for at least five years after the final release of Craft 6.

Craft 6 timeline:

  • Alpha release: Q1/2026
  • Beta release: Q3/2026
  • Full release: End of 2026

4. Editorial Revolution: Approval Workflows and Reporting

Craft 6 introduces a range of features that make the CMS significantly more attractive for editorial teams and enterprise clients:

  • Content Releases & Scheduled Drafts: Multiple entries or drafts can be grouped into a “release” and published together or scheduled for a specific time.
  • Approval Workflows: New multi-stage approval and feedback processes for quality assurance and collaboration.
  • Native Reporting: A flexible, built-in reporting system will be integrated into the core, allowing developers to create custom reports and analyze Commerce data.

5. UX and Accessibility: The New Control Panel

The new user interface (UI) of Craft 6 is being developed with the Lion Web Component Framework and will offer full Dark Mode support and improved mobile usability. A central topic at the conference was web accessibility:

  •  Due to EU legislation, stricter accessibility standards (WCAG and EAA compliance) for digital products will become mandatory from 2025.
  • The Craft CMS Control Panel is being thoroughly tested for WCAG 2.2 compliance, with over 500 accessibility issues already fixed since Craft 5.8. The goal is a fully accessible platform.

6. Developer Tools: Migration and Staging Parity

The switch to Laravel will be supported by enhanced tools. The new CLI utility “craft6-revamp” automates the adaptation of existing projects. Workshop sessions also focused on:

  •  Zero-downtime deployments and improved error recovery.
  • True staging-production parity using containerization (Docker/GitHub Actions).
  • Simplified configuration and Composer guidelines to make onboarding easier for Laravel developers.

7. Performance and E-Commerce: Multisite and Scalability

The conference also highlighted Craft Commerce’s suitability for high-performance projects. Case studies, such as scaling to over 1,000 orders per hour in the floral industry, demonstrated its power in combination with tools like Blitz and Sprig.

  •  Craft Commerce 5/6 focuses on extended multisite capabilities, allowing merchants to manage multiple customized shops per instance.
  • Authenticated GraphQL queries will make it easier to build sophisticated headless e-commerce solutions.

Conclusion: A Future-Ready Craft CMS

Dot All 2025 in Lisbon marked a turning point for Craft CMS. The bold move to Laravel, the clear focus on enterprise requirements such as workflows and reporting, and the uncompromising commitment to accessibility make Craft CMS one of the most flexible and future-proof tools on the market. Agencies and companies seeking a stable, highly scalable, and editor-friendly solution should firmly integrate the Craft 6 roadmap into their strategic planning.

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