Welcome to your April 2025 roundup of all things Concrete CMS. If you missed this month’s Town Hall, we’ve got you covered. From new releases to powerful community contributions and marketplace updates, here’s what’s happening across the Concrete ecosystem.
Big Things Are Brewing in Version 9.4
Let’s start with some good news for developers and site owners alike: a new Release Candidate for Concrete 9.4 is out, and the final version is just around the corner.
So what’s new?
- Improved error handling
- Enhanced import/export functionality
- Quality-of-life updates and a few minor features (hello, dark mode CSS support!)
- PHP 8.4 support
If you’re currently on 9.3, now’s the time to spin up a staging site and test the upgrade. It’s stable, sleek, and nearly final.
Version 8 Still Gets Love Too
Running an older version? No worries. We’ve also rolled out Concrete 8.5.20, the first update to version 8 since last September. While it doesn’t have flashy new features, it comes with:
- Security fixes
- Smoother XML exports
- Migration improvements
If you’re preparing to migrate to version 9, this version will make pulling content out of your old site easier than ever.
Heads up:
Version 8 won’t be supported forever. It’s a great time to start planning your move to version 9.
Community Contributions That Deserve a Standing Ovation
Concrete wouldn’t be what it is without the open-source community. This month, we saw incredible contributions across the board, and we want to shout out a few names:
- Documentation: olivetree, karmantomi, mlocati, triplei, cgrauer, Steevb, Schnabel.Markus, mesuva
- GitHub activity (issues and code): mlocati, ahukkanen, jgarc186, mainio, danklassen, haeflimi, hissy, nickred001, ngc5548, marcokuoni, JohntheFish, BloodyIron, aashish-aenow, dpierreIW, mlocati
A Special Nod to Ahukkanen
Ahukkanen tackled four nuanced core bugs this month—cleaning up log-flooding exceptions, edge-case theme layouts, and stale content references. But what made his work shine? He included tests for every fix. That’s next-level. Thanks for keeping our core robust and future-ready.
Issue spotlight:
- https://github.com/concretecms/concretecms/pull/12484
- https://github.com/concretecms/concretecms/pull/12485
- https://github.com/concretecms/concretecms/pull/12486
- https://github.com/concretecms/concretecms/pull/12487
Marketplace Highlights: New Tools & Themes
Let’s talk add-ons. This month’s releases are all about power and polish:
- Majorca Theme (free): A refreshed version 9 theme.
- Popper Integration (free): Design CTAs and popups with your external Popper account.
- Redirect by Browser Language (free): Automatically send users to the correct language version of a page—query string logic and all.
- Blocks Cloner ($30): Export blocks or areas as XML (plus their assets), import them elsewhere like magic.
- Static Site Exporter ($1,900): Export your entire site as static HTML, CSS, and JS. Perfect for high-security or low-maintenance deployments.
In the Wild: LifeBrain.io
This month’s featured site is LifeBrain.io, a slick, AI-powered platform transforming life insurance quoting for agents. The site pulls in CRM leads, runs smart quotes, and surfaces application options from multiple carriers—all in one place. Hats off to the web design team at Pixo, located in Denver, longtime Concrete CMS experts, for this fantastic build.
Fun in the Forums: A New Segment
We’re kicking off a new section of the Monthly Roundup where we highlight the most interesting, quirky, or helpful questions from the Concrete CMS forums. This community has always been full of smart folks solving real problems together, and we want to shine a light on that.
Each month, we’ll take a few hot topics that sparked conversation and give you the inside scoop—straight from the team.
Here’s what came up this month:
1. Should We Replace X with BlueSky?
A few folks asked about swapping out the X (formerly Twitter) icon in the social block with BlueSky. While there’s no shortage of opinions on Elon, we try not to make changes that break existing functionality for people who still rely on it. Adding BlueSky to Social Icons It’s already in 9.4 as a sharing and profile link option.
That said, BlueSky is now available as an option in 9.4, both for sharing and linking. So if you're ready to fly the coop, the tools are there.
2. File Manager Sort Order
MWouldn’t it be helpful if the file manager remembered your preferred sort order? Whether you like sorting by name or most recently added files, it’s a small tweak that could save clicks and boost productivity.
We agree this is worth exploring and suggest turning it into a GitHub issue. Even better, if someone wants to submit a pull request, we’re all ears. Changing File Manager Sort Order makes sense, sounds like a perfect GitHub issue. Bonus points if it comes with a pull request.
3. Workflow Notification Glitch
Here’s a pesky one. If you hit “Submit to Workflow” more than once without changing anything, it can trigger duplicate notifications. That’s not just annoying—it clutters your workflow history.
This looks like a regression, and we’d love to fix it. If you’ve seen this behavior and can reproduce it, drop it in GitHub. It helps us move faster. Workflow Notifications Doubling Up We’ll look into fixing this, but describing it clearly (ideally with a demo) will help us move faster.
That’s it for this month! Thanks to everyone contributing, reporting bugs, and building beautiful things. If you’re not involved yet, consider this your invite.
Got questions, ideas, or cool Concrete projects? Hit us up in the forums or join us live for next month’s Town Hall.
Stay awesome,
The Concrete CMS Team