Announcing Silverstripe CMS 5.0.0

We’re pleased to announce that the stable release of Silverstripe CMS 5.0.0 is now available. This is the first major release since the adoption of a formal Major Release Policy, and is an important milestone for providing greater certainty about the stability of the project.

This release contains many breaking changes and dependency upgrades, and removes a bunch of technical debt - along with several bug fixes and a few new features.

Setting up Silverstripe CMS for long term success

Most of the work that went into Silverstripe CMS 5 revolved around dependency upgrades and removing deprecated API. While this may not sound exciting, it set us up for long term success.

Running the latest dependencies minimises the risk of vulnerability in Silverstripe CMS 5. It also avoids the need for breaking changes within minor releases.

Most importantly, it gives a clean base to build new features and capabilities in future Silverstripe CMS 5 minor releases.

Upgrading from Silverstripe CMS 4

Most of the key concepts that were in Silverstripe CMS 4 will be unchanged in Silverstripe CMS 5. This will hopefully minimise the upgrade cost for most projects. We encourage you to take the time to read and understand the Silverstripe CMS 5 changelog when scoping your upgrade.

Ultimately the scope of upgrades will vary from project to project, but in general if you start by upgrading to the latest version of modules which is compatible with Silverstripe CMS 4, our hope is that the combination of deprecation warnings and the information in the changelog will provide you with a clear upgrade path.

That said, please raise GitHub issues if you encounter any unexpected problems which have not been called out in the changelog. Unless you report them, we won’t be aware of any regressions, upgrade pains, or improvements we can make to the changelog.

Changes to supported modules

As part of the process of planning this major release, we reviewed the list of commercially supported modules and found that some of these are no longer necessary, and others no longer align with the broader direction the CMS is heading. For most modules where this is the case, we have decided to upgrade the module to be compatible with Silverstripe CMS 5, but we won’t be providing further support or maintenance for them.

There are also a couple of modules which had multiple major releases during the lifetime of Silverstripe CMS 4 - we’ve provided specific upgrade guides for those modules to help you update your project to the latest version.

See the full changelog for more details.

What’s happening to Silverstripe CMS 4?

We said this when we announced the CMS 5 beta release and we’ll keep on saying it: Silverstripe CMS 4 isn’t going anywhere any time soon. We released Silverstripe CMS 4.13.0 on April 26, 2023. While we don’t plan on releasing any more minor releases for the 4.x release line, we’ll still be making patch releases fixing bugs and security vulnerabilities for the next year, and fixing high impact security vulnerabilities for another year after that.

This means you have plenty of time to decide when and how you’ll handle upgrades for any projects you have which currently run Silverstripe CMS 4. There’s no rush.

You can learn more about the support structure in our Major Release Policy or see the roadmap for more specific timeframes.