March 2026: Version 8 Is Done, Two Releases, and AI Gets Philosophical
Light news month, but there's some important stuff in here including a milestone we've been telegraphing for a while. Let's get into it.
March 2026: Version 8 Is Done, Two Releases, and AI Gets Philosophical
Light news month, but there's some important stuff in here — including a milestone we've been telegraphing for a while. Let's get into it.
Version 8 End of Life: It's Official
We've been saying this was coming since 2022, and now it's here. Version 8 support has officially ended. No more updates, security patches, nothing. We held on as long as made sense, but there are fixes we want to ship that just can't be backported forever.
If you're still running version 8 or earlier this is your sign. The upgrade path to version 9 is well-documented, there are people in the forums who can help, and we're happy to work with you on a plan that fits your timeline and budget. Just reach out. You don't have to figure this out alone, but you do have to figure it out.
Two Releases This Month
Concrete CMS 9.4.8 is out and is the release you should be running on production if you're on the 9.4 line. It's a small release a handful of security fixes, nothing that should have you panicking, but worth upgrading. See the 9.4.8 release notes and the security update details for specifics.
Concrete CMS 9.5.0 RC2 is also available for testing. The big headline here isn't features it's PHP 8.5 compatibility. We've updated dependencies throughout the core to get 9.5 ready for PHP's latest, which meant swapping some things out and doing real work under the hood. If you're planning to upgrade to 9.5 when it goes stable, now is a great time to kick the tires on a staging environment and let us know if you hit anything weird. The 9.5.0 RC2 release notes have the full picture.
Site in the Wild: Watashi Life
This month's site showcase is Watashi Life — a clean, well-designed site built on Concrete and hosted on our SaaS platform. It's a nice example of what you can do with the standard block toolkit: a polished homepage with in-context editing, an FAQ block, testimonials, a blog layout that actually looks good, and multilingual support in both English and Japanese. Also: there's a cat in the FAQ section. We support this choice fully.
The Community Is Thinking About AI, and So Are We
Community member posted a proposal worth reading: building a set of community-maintained "skills" files structured markdown docs describing Concrete CMS best practices specifically to help LLMs and coding agents give better results when working with Concrete. If you've tried using ChatGPT or another coding assistant to write Concrete code, you've probably noticed it's hit or miss. It knows the core reasonably well, but package development patterns and current best practices for version 9 are underrepresented in what these models are trained on. Fifteen years of documentation is great for historians; less great when you're asking an AI to scaffold something for 9.5.
The idea is to give coding agents a lightweight, curated reference point not a replacement for docs, but a starting context that gets them closer to "correct for Concrete today" before they start generating code. Andy's take (and ours): this makes sense to house in the main Concrete CMS GitHub organization, not buried in a community repo. We're interested in moving this forward if you want to be part of that conversation, jump into the forum thread.
Andy also shared some practical advice on getting better results from AI coding tools right now, without waiting for any of that infrastructure: point the model at a working implementation of something similar before asking it to build the new thing. Don't ask it to build a block with repeatable fields from scratch give it the accordion block as a reference and say "do this, but for my data structure." It's the same instinct good developers have always had (start from a known working example), it just runs a lot faster now.
Thank Yous
GitHub contributions this month from Chrouglas, moriaiy, dbuerer, JohntheFish, richrawlings, biplobice, illilliinvite, kaktuspalme, and dbuerer. This project runs on people showing up and doing the work thank you.
See you next month.