Yeah, you read that right. We’ve been working CiviCRM version 5 for so long now that it’s almost, but not quite, a household brand. That all changes on 5 March 2025 when the official release of CiviCRM 6 lands. We’re shaking things up!
Lots of details are forthcoming, however before any pre-upgrade anxiety sets it, please note that there are no (expected) breaking changes. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the upgrade to CiviCRM 6 will be as smooth as upgrading to 5.8… wait, where are we now? Anyhow, you get the point.
Mostly CiviCRM 6 represents the official officiality of key improvements, like Standalone, RiverLea, etc. that will have been in the wild and sufficiently tested before March. These developments will play an increasingly important role in CiviCRM, so it makes sense to start them off with a fresh face… errrr… version.
So kick back, relax, enjoy the holidays, make those new years resolutions, and stay tuned for additional details after the first of the year. We’ll follow up with a detailed blog post on January 1st and are planning to host a “State of CiviCRM” webinar on January 14th.
It’s exciting news, we know. It’s one more super awesome thing that you need to record on your 2025 calendar… CiviCRM 6 - March 5th (time to be determined, as usual :D).
Comments
In case you don't live your life in CiviCRM-land and are wondering what Standalone and RiverLea are...
Standalone: CiviCRM has required to sit on top of a CMS (e.g. Drupal, WordPress, ...). This is often what people want, but not always. "Standalone" refers to a way to run CiviCRM without a CMS. This might be a good strategic migration if you only use the CMS for the sake of people being able to log-in and don't rely on any of the CMS's other features, since then you have one less system to administer/maintain/upgrade.
RiverLea: This refers to a new theme for CiviCRM. Or more accurately, a new **set** of themes, based on a new way of *doing* themes for CiviCRM that will enable easier future theming. The hope is that this eventually replaces the existing themes. RiverLea provides several different themes (streams) - one for each of the popular existing themes that broadly resembles it, but is based on modern technologies and typically is much lighter (faster page loads, less CO2 emissions to download), and with more of an effort on accessibility. When this has matured we hope to offer admins the chance to customise the themes more, e.g. brand colours etc.