What's New in Statamic 4?

We build a lot of Statamic sites for our clients. The latest version of Statamic - version 4 - has just been released.

Unlike previous version upgrades, Statamic 4 isn’t as big of a jump from Statamic 3. v1 → v2 and v2 → v3 both had fundamental differences in how they worked behind the scenes.

Statamic has moved to a new versioning strategy where big new releases, like v4, will happen once a year. These will introduce shiny new features, as well as some breaking changes (like dropping support for older versions of the PHP programming language and the Laravel framework).

In this post, I’m going to detail what big, new, shiny things are packed into Statamic 4.

Changes to the Publish Form

Probably the biggest change you’ll notice is to the Publish Forms. These are the create/update pages you see for entries and taxonomies.

Before:

Now:

At the top, you still have the option to switch between different tabs - the navigation has been tidied up a little.
In Statamic 4, fields can now be separated out into different sections which should make it easier when working with long publish forms.

For example: the content for the event is in the first card & two fields for Event Information are shown in the second card. 

Redesigned Set-Picker for Page Builders

The ‘set-picker’, which you’ll often see when adding a block in a page builder, has been redesigned - allowing for sets/blocks to be organised within sections.

Sometimes, if you have lots of page builder blocks you’d see one big list of all available blocks.

For example: if you have a Video Embed, an Image Gallery and a Single Image block, they can now be put inside a ‘Media’ section to help tidy things up a little.

Tweaks to the Listing Table

Listing Tables have had some love in v4 (they’re the tables you see when looking at pages, blog posts, etc).

You’ll notice some small improvements on the table itself but a lot of the changes have to do with filtering & search at the top of the table.

You’re now able to filter entries by fields, status (published/draft), or site if you’re working with a multi-site.

If you want, you can also save the filters you have applied so you can easily use them again.

Under the Hood

In addition to the quality-of-life improvements, Statamic has also done some spring cleaning under the hood.

Statamic 4 now supports Laravel 10, the latest version of the Laravel PHP framework, released in February this year.

In addition, some of the third-party packages that were being used in the Control Panel have been removed (either because they’re old or no longer being used). This means that your Control Panel should be just that little bit quicker. ✨