🥳 🎁 Bolt 5 has been released
Hi there, Bolt community ☕️
We're excited to bring to you the news of the major Bolt 5 release today, 30 August 2021.
In March of this year, we announced that the Core team is making progress towards a new major release. A little under two months ago, the major announcements confirmed the timelines for Bolt versions 3, 4 & 5.
What's new in Bolt 5?
If you followed our Twitter account @BoltCMS, you'll already know the major features that Bolt 5 comes with:
- 🔐 Symfony Roles and Permissions
- 🗣 Localisation of the Bolt Editor in a total of 15 languages
- ♿️. Enhanced web accessibility and a slightly different colour scheme
- 👩🏽💻 Support for PHP 8.0
In addition to that, version 5 comes with many smaller enhancements to make building websites with Bolt as easy as it has ever been!
What about Bolt 3 & 4?
Bolt 3 and 4 will continue to work and be fully operational. Please refer to the full version support announcement for the official support timelines.
How to upgrade Bolt 3 to Bolt 5?
To our community: we've heard you. To facilitate smoother upgrades for you and your clients, the Core team will release a blueprint for upgrading a Bolt 3 website to Bolt 5 by the end of September 2021. This will answer your questions about upgrading major Bolt versions.
How to upgrade Bolt 4 to Bolt 5?
The upgrade path from a Bolt 4 site to Bolt 5 takes at most 15 minutes. The two versions use the same foundation, making a transition both the easy and convenient thing to do in order to benefit from the new features.
You can check the full upgrade instructions on this public GitHub link:
Bolt 4 -> 5 upgrade instructions
Any questions?
If you have any questions regarding the upgrade, Bolt itself or want to find out more about the Core team, check out our Community page.
Below, Bolt's founder Bob den Otter shares with us his perspective on this major milestone achievement for us and our community.
Happy Bolt 5 day, folks! 🛠
Bob, pretty much everyone in the Bolt community knows the one and only, Mr Bolt Creator himself. For the odd chance our reader does not, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Hi, my name is Bob. I work as CTO for Two Kings, the web-agency I founded in 2004. In my spare time I like to game (videogames, boardgames and D&D alike), and I occasionally enjoy a good beer. I live in the Hague, Netherlands, together with my lovely girlfriend, and our two cats.
How long have you used Bolt for, what do you like about it?
Ever since I started working on the web as a professional, I've always had the urge to make tools that will make the lives of people working with the websites we build a little bit easier. Bolt, under it's current name, was conceived in 2012. The basis of the current platform on Symfony 5 was created in 2017.
What I like best about Bolt is probably that we're making a conscious effort to treat the different kind of users of the CMS with the same regards. Be it editors, PHP developers or frontend developers, we'll always keep in mind that these kinds of users have differing demands from a CMS, and we cater to them equally.
With the new 5.0 release, Bolt is coming out with new Yaml migration capabilities. Tell us about it.
One of the problems we bumped into was allowing the users of the system to stay up to date with new functionality in Symfony or in the used components. New features often require additional configuration in the Yaml files, found in the configuration folder. We've developed a tool that will allow us to make these configuration changes for the user when running 'composer update'. This takes away a lot of the hassle when doing the upgrades, and at the same time it allows us to introduce new features and functionality in a simple way.
And how does this new major release help you and your clients?
Bolt 4 was very much a new product, as it was the first major version of Bolt that was using the full capabilities of the Symfony framework. Bolt 5 is more of an iteration on that. Sure, there are a ton of new features, but I think the real benefit of this major version is that we've put in a lot of effort to make almost every aspect of the CMS just a little better. This really shows if you're using the CMS on a frequent basis.