What’s New In Craft CMS 4?

At Eyekiller our content management system (CMS) of choice is Craft CMS. One of Craft's biggest strengths (and what our clients love) is how easy it is for site owners and editors to manage the content and assets on their websites.

From an agency perspective, Craft is the go-to for handling complex designs and providing maximum performance at the same time. Craft 4 launched in May 2022 and has added a wide range of new features, including an improved Author Experience, User Management and Assets. Here's our pick of the best new features in Craft CMS 4 that we've been implementing over the past year.

Author Experience

The content authoring experience describes the way content writers, editors, and reviewers use a CMS platform to write, edit and review content.

For example this could be; writing a page, writing a blog post, taking content through workflow, editing content, uploading assets such as images, videos and PDFs etc. We’re excited to see an (even more) improved authoring experience in Craft 4.

Performance

One of the few drawbacks of Craft 3 was that draft and revision creation could be slow, especially on pages with complex content models and multi-site installs. This has been significantly improved in Craft 4, entries save substantially faster. Which is great news for improving efficiency for site admins when uploading content to the site.

Accessibility

Craft has recently begun the process of making Craft 4 WCAG AA compliant. They've hired a Lead Accessibility Engineer, Matsuko Friedland, to lead this effort.

As part of this process, Craft have been blogging about best practices in relation to what they are working on. The posts are informative, easy to follow and provide excellent advice for Craft CMS and for the wider web in general.

Craft was selected as the CMS for the new Arts Council NI website–which is currently under construction– in part because of the accessibility features, and Craft's commitment to improving accessibility for all.

Custom element filtering

Element index filtering allows you to filter elements based on several conditions, such as Entry Type and Author.

This is a common requirement for content-rich sites which need to provide CMS users with the ability to filter the display of content items based on multiple criteria. This makes the backend more intuitive and flexible to use, further improving the author experience.

Category drafts

In Craft 3, entries have draft functionality, allowing an editor to roll back and revert to an earlier version of the content.

Craft 4 now includes draft support for categories as well. This is a useful fail-safe for content editors who want to revert their work or rollback changes they've made.

Conditional fields

In Craft 3, all layout elements and tabs were displayed in the template by default. In Craft 4, these can now be configured so that fields are displayed only when a certain choice is made (for example, a video URL field will only appear if someone chooses to include a video instead of an image in a hero).

This reduces the number of components, which makes it faster and easier for the editor to use.

Element Slideouts

The element slideout has been significantly upgraded in Craft 4 to allow you to fully edit related entries within entries.

User Management

User management is an important aspect of any CMS. A good CMS should support multiple authors, with their own accounts and edit permissions. A great CMS should allow you to go further with the ability to create User Groups and batch-set permissions.

User Names

In previous versions of Craft, Users had their 'First Name' and 'Last Name' in separate fields. In Craft 4, Users now have a single 'Full Name' field, which makes it neater. First and last names are still available for sorting purposes and no functionality is lost with this feature update.

Inactive users

You can now manage users that represent a person or entity without requiring login credentials.

Address management

In Craft 4, addresses are stored against the User rather than as related customer data. This is a big win for Craft Commerce or SaaS websites because it allows for easier management of Users' locations.

Expanded formatting locale support

In Craft 4, you can now set your own individual Formatting Locale to any locale that they support. This means that if you work with editors in different locations across the world, they can tailor their authoring experience (date and time display formatting and language) to suit them. This is a great feature for large global companies.

Assets

Craft 4 makes it easier to create, organise, and retrieve your digital assets from within the CMS.

Filesystems

​​Volumes no longer have types; they are now assigned a filesystem which handles file operations. Volumes can be assigned to different file systems per environment.

Transform Filesystems

It's now possible to assign a separate filesystem to store image transforms. This means you can have a volume configured to use a non-public filesystem for asset storage, while using a public filesystem for image transforms.

Easier focal point adjustments

It's now possible to edit images' focal points from the preview modals within the Image Editor.

Alternative text

The new Alternative Text field in volume layouts allows you to define alt attributes on system-generated <img> tags, via Asset::getImg() and images rendered within the control panel.

What do our developers think?

There are also a few exciting development improvements. Clinton, our Lead Front-end Developer pointed out that the Control Panel Screens upgrade means Controllers can now provide the HTML for screens in the control panel, which can be rendered as both full pages and slideouts. This allows you to edit sub page content from parent pages. Which is another great time saving feature for content editors.

Ready to upgrade?

If you're running a site on Craft 3, there's no immediate need to upgrade. However, If you’re thinking of upgrading an existing Craft 3 site, you can start by updating to 3.7.40, which adds a Craft 4 Upgrade utility that provides an overview of your plugins’ readiness.

Craft 3 will be fully supported until April 30th, 2023, with security fixes in place until April 30th, 2024. Having said that, now that the end-of-life date for Craft 3 is quickly approaching, it's best practice to start planning the upgrade process as soon as possible. If you plan on working on a significant design or feature update, combining it in with an update to Craft 4 makes sense.

Eyekiller are a Craft CMS Partner so If you're interested in moving your website onto Craft 4, or if you'd like more information, please get in touch with one of our team.