Craft 3, a complete rewrite of the developer-friendly content management system, has been released after a long period of beta testing. Craft 3 includes new features and enhancements that will appeal to developers, designers, and users. Craft 3 is available for deployment across our performance-optimized Craft CMS hosting solutions, including shared, dedicated, and cloud hosting platforms.
As Nexcess clients know, we take performance seriously, so we're particularly pleased with the across-the-board performance improvements in Craft 3. Craft's developers have put a lot of work into extracting every last drop of performance, resulting in a 3x improvement over Craft 2. Craft 3 is built on PHP 7, which is itself much faster than previous versions. Combined with our performance-optimized Craft CMS hosting, Craft CMS offers an incredible low-latency user experience.
Almost a year ago, we took a look at what users could expect from Craft 3. Now that it is ready for production, we'd like to highlight some of the most important new features.
WordPress users have long taken advantage of its multi-site features to deploy more than one site from the same installation. Craft 3 introduces the ability to create, manage, and configure several sites from a single interface. This is great for teams managing more than one site.
A new plugin store, which is integrated into the Craft control panel, makes it easy to view, buy, and install a curated selection of plugins.
Matrix is a new block-based field type that offers superb flexibility for building complex content layouts.
One-click updating does exactly what you expect. Craft and plugin updates are centralized in the control panel and updates can be run in seconds. Easy updates are convenient, but, more importantly, they improve security. Site owners are more likely to update if it's easy.
Craft 3 includes an image editor with flip and rotate functionality. My favorite feature is Focal Points, which can be used to specify the most important part of an image, ensuring that it isn't obscured when the image's dimensions are changed for serving to different device sizes.
Although the enhancements in Craft 3 make it a compelling upgrade, there is no rush if you prefer to stick with Craft 2 for the time being. Craft 2 will be fully supported by its developers until March 2019 and receive security updates until March 2020.
Nexcess provides performance-optimized Craft CMS hosting for sites of all sizes, with shared hosting, dedicated server hosting, and custom enterprise clusters for the largest sites.
Nexcess Cloud Craft CMS hosting provides the ultimate in performance, scalability, and security with auto scaling, a web application firewall, and built-in developer tools that include version control, Composer, and multi-user SSH.