What's New in Craft CMS 5.9

Craft 5.9 is a qual­i­ty-of-life release that improves the con­tent author­ing expe­ri­ence and gives devel­op­ers more flex­i­bil­i­ty in configuration.

For Con­tent Authors #

• Mul­ti-page entry sources let you orga­nize a crowd­ed side­bar into sep­a­rate pages. If you’ve got a site with dozens of sec­tions, you’ll appre­ci­ate this one.
• Inline list view mode brings back the com­pact dis­play style like the tag field. Entry fields, cat­e­go­ry fields, and asset fields can all use this tighter for­mat now.
• Matrix field improve­ments add per-group ​“Add” but­tons when you have grouped entry types, plus new bulk actions for expand­ing, col­laps­ing, and copy­ing blocks. This will only dis­play when there’s suf­f­i­cent space (aka not in nar­row or mobile views).
• Field editabil­i­ty con­di­tions now sup­port ele­ment-based con­di­tions, not just user per­mis­sions. This means you can keep fields vis­i­ble but locked based on anoth­er field’s val­ue, with a clear ​“Read Only” badge. No more jar­ring field hide/​show behavior.
• Acces­si­bil­i­ty improve­ments for the focal point tool, sortable items, and mobile bulk actions.

For Devel­op­ers #

• Envi­ron­ment vari­ables can now appear any­where with­in set­tings that sup­port them, using either $ENV_NAME or ${ENV_NAME} syn­tax. Two new run­time vari­ables (CRAFT_SITE and CRAFT_SITE_UPPER) help with mul­ti-site configurations.
• New Twig func­tions: randomString() and uuid() for gen­er­at­ing unique iden­ti­fiers, plus the hash fil­ter now accepts an algo­rithm parameter.
• Export for­mats now include XLSX and YAML. Let’s go spreadsheets!
• GraphQL sup­ports cre­at­ing unpub­lished drafts, and Craft Solo gets a new ​“View user” schema option.
• That’s not every­thing! View the offi­cial changelog/​release notes to see all of the changes in 5.9.