TL;DR:
Kirby 6.0.0-alpha.1 is a very early developer preview with Vue 3 support, backend refactoring but no new features at this point. If you are not working on third-party plugins or your own custom Panel extensions, you can happily skip this release for now. Pre-releases with features and enhancements will follow in early 2026.
Important
Don't use Kirby 6 in production yet
ETA for Kirby 6
We plan for a final release in the second half of 2026.
What about Kirby 5?
Kirby 5 is our latest and greatest release and will be relevant for many more months. We will be releasing new updates and features and there’s absolutely no reason to already think about Kirby 6 at this point if you are not a plugin developer.
Upgrade prices?
According to our license model that we started with Kirby 4, Kirby 6 will be a free upgrade for anyone who bought or will buy a Kirby Basic or Kirby Enterprise license, no matter if you were one of the first with Kirby 4 or if your project just started. You can recognize this if your license key starts with K-BAS or K-ENT. You can buy a Kirby license today and upgrade for free to Kirby 6 at any point later in 2026.
We are migrating to Vue 3
What are the benefits for you?
- Security
- A future-proof ecosystem
- Better Panel performance (Vue 3 is faster and smaller than Vue 2)
Details
Vue 2 has reached its End of Life in December 2024, which means that it does no longer get security updates. There are so far no vulnerabilities that affect you directly. But this could change any time. To keep Kirby secure in the future, we have to take this step and upgrade to Vue 3. The End Of Life for Vue 2 also means that the Vue ecosystem has shifted to Vue 3 support and it’s getting harder and harder to get good third party libraries and components that still support Vue 2. This is not a good state for the future of Kirby’s ecosystem.
Why not earlier?
With the upgrade to Vue 3, all third-party plugins for the Panel also need to be upgraded to Vue 3. This is a huge step and we have to prepare it carefully, to provide a good path for Kirby’s ecosystem. We also had our own challenges to migrate to Vue 3 without breaking too much of our own components and APIs. But we feel ready now to take this step to create a solid foundation.
There is no need to worry about security for sites with Kirby 4 and Kirby 5. You can omit the vulnerable parts of Vue 2 by disabling the Vue template compiler.
How can you test Kirby 6.0.0-alpha.1?
The easiest way is to install a fresh starterkit and replace the kirby folder with the one from this release (see ZIP download below) The starterkit should already be fully compatible. The alpha label should make it clear enough, but here's a word of warning again. Don't use this release in production and always make backups of your projects and especially the content. We don't take any responsibility for issues that lead to content-loss or other nasty side-effects.
What do you need to do next?
As plugin developer
If you are maintaining Kirby plugins that extend the Panel, you need to upgrade them with the latest alpha version of kirbyup. You will have plenty of time to prepare this until the final release of Kirby 6. But the earlier you discover potential problems, the sooner we can work together on fixing them.
Here are the steps to take to migrate your plugin to Vue 3:
- Switch your kirbyup version in your package.json to 4.0.0-alpha.3
- Run
npm run build - Test your plugin in the Panel, check for Vue 3 warnings in the console
- Adapt your plugin code if you encounter any warning
- Reach out to the Kirby team in the #v6 channel on Discord if you encounter any problems or difficulties upgrading
As site developer
If you are writing custom Panel plugins for your clients, you can already try to upgrade one of your plugins and see if you get it up and running with alpha 1. Follow the instructions for plugin developers above in such a case. Otherwise, this first alpha will probably not be very exciting for you yet and you might want to wait some more until we have more features to show or the first plugins are ready to be tested.
As customer
Nothing at this point. This really is a developer preview. We will have more exciting Kirby 5 and 6 updates for you in the following months.
Work in progress
- We've started refactoring our backend code for the Panel, to be easier to extend, test and optimize.
- Our entirel Panel backend setup is closer to what we are also doing on the frontend.
- We have a new Controller architecture for all views, dialogs, drawers and requests.
- We have a new Kirby\Panel\Ui backend library of digital-twins for our frontend components. This library makes it easier for plugin developers and us, to create type-safe responses for our Vue frontend.
- We are working on refactoring our core fields to be PHP class based. These are already taking the Panel performance to an entirely new level in our tests. More in alpha.2.
- We are making our blueprints simpler. More details will follow soon.
- After this foundational work, we have plenty of ideas and plans for features, based on your feedback on Nolt.
Full changelog
We are collecting all changes in our pre-release changelog, if you already want to dive deeper: https://github.com/getkirby/kirby/blob/6.0.0-alpha.1/CHANGELOG.md