Today we are pleased, excited, and relieved to release the long awaited and massively improved Statamic 2!

To say this was a significant undertaking would be an understatement. I could write a book (and maybe will) about everything Jason and I have learned by rebuilding a product from the ground up, but this is neither the time and the place. This is a day for celebration and much merryment! 🎉

Statamic 2 took a year of hard work, sweat, and whiskey tears, 4,000 commits, 200 beta testers, and 43 alpha/beta releases.

We love you all. We built this for you and we sincerely hope you like it.

So, what's new?

_If you knew what was new in Statamic 2 You'd throw a party and grab your kazoo. But first we must show you these things that are new Things that may seem too good to be true._

You probably would never make it to the bottom of this blog post if we listed everything here, so I'll just give you a few of the high points and then recommend you jump over to the Features section to see even more details.

Built on Laravel

PHP developers rejoice! Addons can take advantage of all its built in features and any 3rd party composer packages you want to bring in as dependencies. We use Laravel's validation, caching system, Flysystem for file drivers - which means you can now mount Assets, Content, Users, or other areas on Amazon S3 or any other supported location -- and lots more.

Brand new Control Panel

With 100x more capabilities than v1's, you are no longer limited to simply editing content and adding entries. It leverages the amazing Vue.js library to power fieldtypes, live preview, drag and drop reordering, and a pile of other useful and neat features. We even took the effort to properly theme Bootstrap to make extending it simple and familiar for developers.

We even had 31Three dive in with UI concepts that got the ball rolling. Those guys are awesome.

New, powerful Content Types

Where v1 had Pages and Entries, Statamic 2 extends those features (like customized fieldsets, relationships, and so on) to Taxonomies, Assets, Users, and Globals. Your photos and files can now have their own custom fields and data that you can use and reuse anywhere in your site. We think it's pretty cool. You probably will too.

Significantly more URL control

You are no longer limited to building your content through file and folder hierarchy. Collections of entries now have their own routes, letting you create whatever URL pattern you'd like. Fancy a WordPress style for legacy purposes? No problem.

collections:
  blog: /blog/{year}/{month}/{day}/{slug}

Even more control of your templates

Not only did we make our template language a lot more powerful with a more flexible syntax and roughly a hundred new modifiers, we've also added support for Laravel Blade.

True multilingual sites

Multilingual capabilities are built right in. By configuring additional locales, content becomes translatable with the flick of a switch. Each language can run on its own URL, so you can have example.com and example.com/de or fr.example.com, or example.de. Lots of control. Lots of options.

Forms and Search are now core

The features that Raven and Bloodhound provided as addons are now part of the core Statamic experience. We felt that Statamic 2 should be able to deliver the features needed for 85% of the normal sites out there.

Other new things too!

I could go on forever on features. We'll be showcasing things you can do now with screencasts, blog posts, and articles, but we must get to the end of this post eventually so you can you know, go buy it. Right? Onwards!

Aside from a new site, new features, new docs, and all that...

Everything is redesigned

You will certainly have noticed a new website by now. In fact, all of our various websites have been completely redesigned. And for the first time ever, all share the same brand experience letting you use a single account!

Honestly that shouldn't be a big deal in today's world, but it is to us. It took a lot of work. You'll notice everything now shares a very minimal UI. You might even think too minimal for our brand. And while you might be right, we had a ton of content and features, between the site, docs, forums, user account, and store/checkout experience to consolidate, and going as minimal as possible was the best way to get to the finish line. Expect fun updates over the coming months. We needed to ship this thing!

A reorganized Lodge

The Lodge had a lot of different rooms to have different types of conversation in. Inside those rooms you could make all different types of posts. It was kind of confusing to be honest. It may have even prevented people from using it. So we stripped it down to 3 areas:

• Discussions: for chatting about things. Any things.
• Questions: for when you're looking for an answer to a problem. Posts in here can be marked with the right answer, much like Stack Overflow.
• Show & Tell: Post up projects (sites, addons, themes, anything Statamic related really) and collect high fives and feedback.

We hope that between the redesign and the simplified experience we can give revive the Lodge to its former (pre-Slack) glory. It will also be the source of our "Official Support", so keep that in mind.

A little housekeeping

This is important! If you've purchased any v1 licenses, you'll need to migrate your old account data to your universal Statamic account. If you joined the Lodge, you already have one - it's the same platform.

Migrating your old Store account

Create an account or sign in to you current one and head to https://account.statamic.com/migrate. There we'll walk you through the 3 step process. It should take about 2 minutes. We tried to come up with a solution that didn't take an action on your part, but there just wasn't one. It's a security thing. Thanks in advance for being so understanding.

Upgrading from v1

You can upgrade your Pro v1 licenses for $99 and Personal for $169. Statamic 2 is a single license for a single price, hence the difference. As for how to upgrade, head over to the Upgrade Guide.

The v1 docs are still available and you can still download and use v1, Raven, and Bloodhound from your account (purchasing a v2 license gives you the option of using v1 or v2 - for those that may need that for legacy purposes).

Now what?

While we head off to work on 2.0.1 you should Buy Statamic 2 and go build something awesome, please! Read the docs. Tell your friends. Let us know what you think. Or hey, go hiking! It's springtime and the crocuses are in bloom.