Last week at the Dot All conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Brandon Kelly officially announced that Craft CMS is moving to Laravel as its underlying framework.
Craft 6 will be on Laravel.
Brandon Kelly at Dot All 2025 showing the architecture difference between Craft 1-5 and Craft 6.
The original plan to phase the migration to Laravel across versions 6–8 was abandoned. Instead, Craft will be ported directly, adopting a stock Laravel application architecture, as seen in the image above.
This means:
Craft will run as part of your own Laravel application.
Craft itself will exist in the Service Providers layer.
Plugins will also be registered in the Service Providers layer.
For plugin developers, disruption will be minimal. A Yii2 adapter (available as a composer package) will handle compatibility, rewriting core classes as Laravel wrappers. Developers will only need to require the package in their projects.
[W]e’re building a Yii 2 adapter package, which provides a compatibility layer for plugins and modules written for Craft 5, keeping breaking changes to an absolute minimum. Simply include it in your plugin or project, and keep it around as long as you need it. In most cases, the plugin will continue to work without making a single change.
That's a huge and impressive promise.
New features in Craft 6
Brandon also announced some new features for Craft 6:
Content Releases
Scheduled Drafts
Content Importing
Content Approval Workflow
Edit Page Commenting
Element Activity Logs
Control Panel UI Refresh
Craft 6 will also introduce a brand new control panel UI, built from scratch and made for easier extending. The main features noted by Brandon will be:
Dark mode
First-class mobile support
WCAG 2.2 accessibility compliance
Decoupled web components
Storybook-powered style guide, available to plugin developers for standardized UI elements
When will it be ready?
The Craft 6 timeline is long because of the revamp work needed to pull this off, however, here's what you can expect as of right now:
Q1 2026 — Alpha release
Q3 2026 — Beta release
Q4 2026 — General Availability
Feature development will continue for six months after the alpha. General release is expected about one year from now.
What now?
Now, you're probably wondering: what can I do right now to prepare for this?
My advice:
➡️ Keep building with Craft 5 as you do right now. Core building techniques won't change as far as we know.
➡️ Keep your existing projects up-to-date.
➡️ Make plans to upgrade any projects on older versions of Craft, so they don't lag too far behind.
➡️ Stay tuned in to CraftQuest for updates and training on Craft 6 changes and features. I'll be revamping all of my material to be relevant to all changes in Craft 6.
