Statamic 6, six months in

Fifty-one releases

Between 6.0 on January 28 and 6.27.2 on August 12, Statamic shipped 51 releases, roughly two a week. The release notes for that period list 83 new features and about 700 fixes. Most of the fixes are small. A rewrite of the control panel on this scale was always going to need follow-up work, and the team has been doing it steadily instead of saving it up for a big release.

For anyone maintaining client sites, that pace has a practical side. A site that's two months behind is more than a dozen releases behind, so small, regular updates are easier than one big jump.

What filled the gaps

In February I pointed out that the new security features stopped at the control panel. That changed in April. Passkeys, two-factor authentication, and elevated sessions came to the front end in 6.13 and 6.15, together with rate limits on logins and forms. For sites with a member area, that's the most important addition since launch.

Other gaps closed along the way. Statamic supported Laravel 13 from 6.5 in March, two weeks before Laravel itself was released. The same version added image cropping to the control panel, which moved to the server in June. Fieldset sections, GraphQL authentication, custom link types, and computed default values filled in the rest. None of these is big on its own, but together they make Statamic 6 feel less like a fresh foundation and more like a finished product.

Where I was wrong

In my February piece, I called the new date handling the change I was most curious to see in real projects. It turned out to be the rough edge of the release. Statamic 6 moves every date through the control panel as UTC, and for date fields without a time, that meant editors could see or even save the wrong day, depending on their time zone. The main fix landed in 6.17 in May, and the last gaps closed in July. I've written up the whole story separately.

The decision behind it still makes sense to me. A CMS whose editors work in different time zones should handle dates in UTC. But it was the one part of Statamic 6 that needed months of post-launch fixes. If your sites already run Statamic 6 and use date fields, make sure they're on 6.17 or later, and on 6.25 or later if they use date ranges with times.

What hasn't arrived yet

The January release post named three things coming next: improvements for multi-site and multi-language setups, Forms 2.0, and Workflows. Six months later, none of them have shipped.

Forms 2.0 is the closest. On August 7, Jack McDade published a sneak peek. It shows a new three-panel form builder and multi-page forms that visitors can finish later. Conditional logic gets a visual editor, and a form can have its own URL without a custom template. There's no release date yet, only "coming soon." Multi-site and Workflows haven't appeared in the release notes at all.

The release post never gave dates for any of them, and the team was open about prioritizing the foundation. But if you chose Statamic 6 for one of those three features, you're still waiting.

Outside the release notes

Two things happened around Statamic 6 that matter for anyone recommending it to clients. On May 1, prices went up for the first time in six years. Statamic Pro now costs $349 per site and $99 a year for updates, which puts it close to Craft Pro.

And on August 4, Statamic announced that laravel.com now runs on it. The site had been built with Blade and Markdown, then with Filament, and the marketing team can now manage pages without relying as much on developers. For a CMS that has always pitched itself to Laravel developers, it's hard to think of a better reference.

Where that leaves Statamic 6

In February, I advised waiting a little before moving existing sites. That waiting period is over. Since then, Statamic has shipped dozens of patch releases, and 6.17 fixed the worst of the date problems. Meanwhile, Statamic 5 stopped getting bug fixes in March. Security fixes continue until December. That's enough time to plan the move, but not to keep putting it off. My guide to moving client sites covers which sites to move first.

Six months is too early to judge the long game I wrote about in February, but so far it's working. The foundation has held up, and the features added since, like front-end passkeys and image cropping, didn't need workarounds to fit in. The real test is what comes next. Forms 2.0, multi-site, and Workflows will show whether the foundation was worth the wait.