Turns Out · August 20, 2026 · 6 min read

We Ran Every Craft CMS 6 Alpha So You Don't Have To

A practitioner's read on the Laravel port — what's real, what's rough, and why 2027 is the year that actually matters.

On September 29, 2025, "Craft's Going Laravel" went live on the Craft CMS blog, a few days after the formal reveal at Dot All in Lisbon. Within a week, half the ecosystem had republished it — summaries, hot takes, "what this means for you" posts that were mostly the announcement with the serial numbers filed off. What we couldn't find was anyone writing from the experience of actually running the thing.

So that's the gap we're filling. Since the first alpha shipped in May 2026, we've run every release against copies of real client stacks — the messy ones, with plugin lists that accumulated over years. Here's what the port actually is, what the alphas taught us, and what we'd do (and pointedly not do) about it while you're on Craft CMS 5.

A strict port, on purpose

The official framing is "(mostly) a strict port to Laravel," and after months inside the alphas, we'd say the framing holds. Yii components get swapped for their Laravel equivalents — ActiveRecord for Eloquent, plus the container, router, events, cache, and queues. The content model, elements, fields, Matrix, and the plugin architecture all carry over.

The "strict" part is a lesson learned in public. The announcement post admits the Craft CMS 2→3 rewrite "took several years too long, required plugins to be rewritten... didn't have any compelling new author-facing features." Nobody wants a sequel to that, least of all the people who lived it. Hence: same product, new engine. And none of this was sprung on anyone — the move was pre-announced in the "Change of Plans" post back in June 2024, fifteen months before Lisbon.

Two things do push past "port," though. First, Craft CMS 6 installs as a Laravel package into an existing Laravel app — the team "rearchitected how Craft works in relationship to its framework," and the upgrade guide is blunter still: "Craft 6.x projects are just Laravel applications." If your company has a Laravel product and a CMS-driven marketing site glaring at each other across two repos, that's the sentence worth rereading.

Second, templating. Twig stays the default; Blade is optional and interoperable in both directions — you can call blade() from Twig, @include Twig templates from Blade, and there are directives like @craftCss for the asset pipeline. Your existing templates don't move to a new language, and your next Laravel-native hire doesn't have to learn one.

What the alphas actually taught us

Start with the cadence, because it tells you something: alpha releases land every one to two weeks. The alpha announcement in May 2026 marked the codebase as "completely ported to Laravel" after roughly a year of work — and as we write this, mid-Q3, there's still no beta tag.

The control panel is being rebuilt as a Vue/Inertia app, and the alpha post tells you to "expect... many rough edges." We can confirm the warning is honest. That's not a criticism — it's what alphas are for — but it is why nobody should be quoting a client a Craft CMS 6 build this quarter, and why the posts treating GA as imminent are doing you a disservice.

The plugin story is where the alphas genuinely surprised us. The craftcms/yii2-adapter package keeps Craft CMS 5 plugins running "in most cases without making a single change." Viget's characterization — "a deprecation runway, not a permanent free pass" — is exactly the right way to hold it: plugin authors get years to port, not a weekend. Josh Crawford of Verbb, who maintains 60-plus plugins and would be first against the wall in a forced rewrite, calls the adapter "a big win for developers and clients" and sees no "massive, immediate need to port plugins."

What to do while you're on Craft CMS 5

The upgrade mechanics, per the official guide: get to the latest Craft CMS 5, be on PHP 8.5 or newer, update every plugin, then run the craftcms/craft6-revamp tool, which converts your project into a standard Laravel application — templates move to resources/views/, and db.php gives way to environment variables. Mechanical, not scary.

Three more things that are safe — and worth doing — right now:

• —Convert Categories, Tags, and Globals to entries. Craft CMS 5 supports it today, and it's one less moving part when the real upgrade lands.
• —Audit your plugin list for abandoned ones. The adapter saves maintained plugins; nothing saves an unmaintained one. This is the single genuine risk in the whole migration.
• —Line up PHP 8.5 hosting. It's the floor for Craft CMS 6, and it's a better conversation to have with your host now than mid-upgrade.

When to actually upgrade

The official plan says beta in Q3 2026 and GA in Q4 2026. It is Q3 2026 as we write this, alphas are still shipping every week or two, and there's no beta tag. Treat those quarters as targets, not promises.

And there is no burning platform. Craft CMS 5 is the long-term support release: active support through December 31, 2030, and security fixes through December 31, 2031. For contrast, Craft CMS 4's security support ended April 30, 2026 — that's what a real deadline looks like, and if you're still on 4, that is your actual emergency. On 5, you have half a decade of runway.

So here's our advice, as an agency that would happily bill for this work: most production sites should plan the 5→6 upgrade for 2027, after GA has spent a few months proving itself on other people's websites. We make money doing upgrades and we're still telling you to wait a year. Draw your own conclusions about how confident we are in that advice.

One honest caveat from across the fence: Statamic's comparison page calls Craft CMS 6 "a port of Yii-era architecture, not a clean-sheet Laravel design." Fair jab. It's also a description of the strategy, not a flaw in it — a clean sheet is precisely what the Craft CMS 2→3 years taught this team to avoid. Different products, different bets.

If Laravel's creator is comfortable with the marriage, the framework-risk row in your spreadsheet can probably relax.

We keep a full briefing on the move at wideweb.pro/craft-cms-6-laravel, and we offer a free readiness audit: we'll read your deprecation log and your plugin list and tell you whether 2027 belongs in your budget or just your calendar. Sometimes the answer is "neither, yet." That's the audit working as intended.