After months of hard work, Statamic 4 is now finally available.
This release focuses on two things in particular, an improved user experience in the Control Panel and continued modernization of our code base.
The heart of Statamic, the Control Panel, is now more intuitive and got a streamlined look. We updated lots of UI components to offer more consistency, better accessibility, and just better looks overall.
We introduced CSS's new Container Queries throughout the Control Panel which is why everything is now more responsive and adaptable. Using Container Queries also means less JavaScript and no more watchers to add or remove classes dynamically resulting in a better performance.
Tabs and sections got a major overhaul in Statamic 4 compared to the previous version. What we called sections before got renamed to tabs (they're just that, tabs) and sections are a new addition giving you a better visual hierarchy when editing your content. Think of them as cards for an improved structure.
Another example of our improved UX is our set/block picker for the Bard and Replicator fields. It's usually the component you would go for when building something like a page builder with Statamic. We completely reimagined it and it now lets you organize your sets/blocks into groups with over 150 hand-picked icons to choose from. It also offers a handy search feature to quickly find the set you're looking for.
Our code modernization means we now officially support Laravel 10. On top of that, we switched to Vite as our default build tool, and upgraded to Tailwind CSS 3.
Other new features and changes
- Improved Lists with Horizontally Scrollable Tables
- New Table Filter UI/UX
- New Icon and Width Fieldtypes
- Redesigned Color Fieldtype
- Redesigned List Fieldtype
- Redesigned Time Fieldtype
- Redesigned Asset Editor
- Grid, Replicator, and Table Fieldtypes get a Fullcreen Mode
- Additional dependency cleanup (updated, refactored, and removed a number of third-party ones)
- Dropped Support for PHP 7 and Laravel 8
Statamic is open-source and free to use within the limits of the Solo license. The Pro license is $259 and gives you a range of features, like unlimited user and roles, revisions, drafts, a content history, and Git integration right in the Control Panel to name a few. More details about the licensing and pricing can be found on Statamic's pricing page.
For even more details about Statamic 4 head over to the official announcement blog post on statamic.com or watch the launch video on YouTube giving you an overview of new features and other changes.
