The first release candidate for Concrete CMS 9.0 is now available! This release has been in development for several years, and is our biggest release to date. Read on for more information about what's changed and what you can help with. 

Major new features in version 9 include:

• Boards and summary templates, a new way to aggregate and display content.
• Containers, a new flexible layout system.
• Multi-Site built into the core.
• A more beautiful and faster interface, including a completely redesigned file manager featuring a new image editor.
• Fully upgraded third party web components, including the latest Bootstrap 5, the latest jQuery (when needed) and much more.
• Fully upgraded third party PHP components, including the latest Laravel and Symfony libraries that we use.
• A completely new system for running PHP processes, named Tasks, that can be run instead of Jobs. Tasks feature queueing support, a much nicer syntax for developers, scheduling, a unified system for input and output, live feedback in the Dashboard, and much more.
• A completely rebuilt theme customizer, with support for SASS.
• A new gallery block built into the core
• Much, much more.

Want to see some of what version 9 has in store? Check out our YouTube videos:

Version 9: Sneak Peak

Version 9: Containers

Version 9: Automated Tasks

A full list of what's changed can be found here:

https://documentation.concretecms.org/developers/introduction/version-history/90-release-notes

There's still a lot to do with version 9 – most of it around backward compatibility. Now that we have a release candidate, we're going to be installing this on existing sites, upgrading them, seeing what breaks, and fixing that. We hope to make this as painless a process as possible, when version 9 is fully released this fall. Please download a copy, install it, upgrade your existing sites (only on a staged copy, please, and definitely take multiple backups – things are almost guaranteed to not be 100% correct on existing themes quite yet.) 

Let us know how the process goes in GitHub and the forums. 

Thanks!