Silverstripe CMS 6.0.0 alpha release

Silverstripe CMS has hit a new milestone—Silverstripe CMS 6.0.0-alpha1 has been released. This marks the first step in the journey towards a stable release.

This is the first part of the major release cycle and provides the community with an opportunity to start getting their hands dirty and see what CMS 6 will be like.

It’s important to note that the CMS Squad is still making breaking changes, so keep an eye out for the beta release which marks the end of the planned breaking changes.

What does this mean for me?

If you’re a developer, this is your first real chance to get a feel for what the upgrade from CMS 5 to CMS 6 is likely to look like, and to share feedback with the CMS Squad. Install it and see what works, and what doesn’t work how you’d expect it to.

If you find any unexpected regressions or have feedback about the scope of the upgrade or any of the content in the changelog, please raise a GitHub issue with “CMS 6 REGRESSION” or “CMS 6 CHANGELOG” in the title, so we can notice it right away.

If you’re a product owner or other decision maker, this milestone acts as more of a reminder that CMS 6 is coming and is a chance to look at the changelog to see what changes are in store.

Silverstripe CMS 6 release timeline

As mentioned above, this is just the first step towards a stable release of Silverstripe CMS 6.0.0.

It’s possible that some modules may receive additional alpha releases independently of the rest of Silverstripe CMS, e.g. silverstripe/framework may get a 6.0.0-alpha2 release on its own. If that happens, there won’t be a changelog to accompany those changes, but the changes will be reflected in the “releases” section in GitHub for those modules.

The major release policy outlines the release cycle for major releases of Silverstripe CMS. Following that policy, the following milestones will follow:

Note that the schedule assumes everything goes well and there are no delays required to resolve regressions or complete planned work. The major release policy provides a release window between April and June for the stable release. The beta and release candidate schedules may also change as needed.

After the stable release of 6.0.0, the minor release policy applies. New minor releases will be released for CMS 6 around April and October each year, for two years. This is the same release schedule that was used for CMS 5.

Changes to supported modules

Part of the major release cycle includes an update to the list of modules which receive commercial support. We’ve evaluated the list of modules which had commercial support in CMS 5 and found that some of these are no longer necessary, others no longer align with the broader direction the CMS is heading, and some would be better maintained by the community members who use them.

Some modules which are losing commercial support are being made compatible with CMS 6 but will rely on community efforts to maintain them going forward. Other modules will not be made CMS 6 compatible unless the community decides to upgrade them.

If a module which is losing commercial support is important to you, we welcome you to become a maintainer! Email community@silverstripe.org to let us know if you’re keen.

To see which modules have lost commercial support, see the 6.0.0-alpha1 changelog.

You can find the list of modules which will continue to be commercially supported for CMS 6 in the commercially supported modules page.

Other changes to be aware of

A big part of major releases includes breaking changes, and this release is no different in that respect. The changelog outlines the full scope of the breaking changes in this release, but there are a few changes that we expect could be quite disruptive that we’d like to specifically point out.

These are the areas we think will need the most attention for scoping upgrades, and for testing regressions both in Silverstripe CMS itself and in your customisations.

• Many classes have been renamed or had updated namespaces
• Many extension hooks have been renamed
• DBField is now validated
• SiteTree uses form field scaffolding for getCMSFields

Known potential issues

We’re still working on implementing changes for CMS 6, which means some work that we’re planning to do hasn’t been completed yet. In some cases this might cause regressions until the work has been completed.

If you find a regression, check if one of these might resolve it before raising an issue on GitHub.

• The Silverstripe CMS codebase supports PHP 8.4, but you may see some PHP deprecation warnings coming from upstream dependencies which haven’t been updated yet. We’re keeping an eye on this.
• The changes to validation for DBField and FormField are not yet complete
  • https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework/issues/11453
  • https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework/issues/11468
  • https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework/issues/11423
• Many of the PHP and JavaScript dependencies used haven’t been upgraded yet

What about CMS 5?

CMS 5 isn’t going anywhere. There will be one more minor release for CMS 5, which will have extended support, just like CMS 4.13 did.

CMS 5.4 will release before CMS 6.0, around April, and will then have full bug fix and security patch support for a year, and an additional year of support after that for high severity security fixes.

You can learn more about the support structure in our major release policy and minor release policy, or see the roadmap page for more specific timeframes.

Will there be an upgrade tool?

I’ve seen this question asked a few times already. There is currently no upgrade tool to aid in the upgrade from CMS 5 to CMS 6, though we will consider looking into one if there is sufficient community demand for one.

There are some community-lead tools which help to resolve deprecations, such as wernerkrauss/silverstripe-rector. Our initial recommendation would be for the community to contribute enhancements to such a tool, which already has some of the ground-work prepared.

Enough talk, show me the changelog

Review the Silverstripe CMS 6.0.0-alpha1 changelog.