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The “Rich Text” field type has been removed from Craft 3, in favor of new Redactor and CKEditor plugins.

If you have any existing Rich Text fields, they will be automatically converted to Redactor fields when you install the Redactor plugin.

If you do install the Redactor plugin, you will need to ensure that your Redactor configs in config/redactor/ are valid JSON. That means:

• No comments
• All object properties (the config setting names) must be wrapped in double quotes
• All strings must use double quotes rather than single quotes

// Bad:
{
  /* interesting comment */
  buttons: ['bold', 'italic']
}

// Good:
{
  "buttons": ["bold", "italic"]
}

The “Position Select” field type has been removed from Craft 3. If you had any Position Select fields, they will be converted to Dropdown fields, with all the same options.

If you miss Position Select, you can try installing the Position Fieldtype plugin, which brings it back.

Support for Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, and Google Cloud Storage have been moved into plugins. If you have any asset volumes that were using those services in Craft 2, you will need to install the new plugins:

• Amazon S3
• Rackspace Cloud Files
• Google Cloud Storage

Some general config settings have been renamed in Craft 3. The old setting names have been deprecated, but will continue to work until Craft 4.

¹ Performance should no longer be a major factor when setting backupOnUpdate to false, since backups aren’t generated by PHP anymore.

² defaultFileMode is now null by default, meaning it will be determined by the current environment.

*³ Settings that supported values defined by your environmentVariables config setting in Craft 2 can now be set to system environment variables and aliases in Craft 3. (See Environmental Configuration to learn more about those.) Site URL and Local volume settings will automatically be converted to the new @alias/sub/path syntax when updating to Craft 3.

⁴ securityKey is no longer optional. If you haven’t set it yet, set it to the value in storage/runtime/validation.key (if the file exists). The auto-generated validation.key file fallback will be removed in Craft 4.

Some config settings have been removed entirely:

The omitScriptNameInUrls setting can no longer be set to 'auto', as it was by default in Craft 2. Which means you will need to explicitly set it to true in config/general.php if you’ve configured your server to route HTTP requests to index.php.

Similarly, the usePathInfo setting can no longer be set to 'auto' either. If your server is configured to support PATH_INFO, you can set this to true. This is only necessary if you can’t set omitScriptNameInUrls to true, though.

If you have any URL rules saved in config/routes.php, you will need to update them to Yii 2’s pattern-route syntax.

• Named parameters in the pattern should be defined using the format (<ParamName:RegExp>) rather than as a regular expression subpattern ((?P<ParamName>RegExp)).
• Unnamed parameters are no longer allowed (e.g. ([^\/]+)). They must also be converted to the new named parameter syntax (<ParamName:RegExp>).
• Controller action routes should be defined as a string ('action/path') rather than an array with an action key (['action' => 'action/path']).
• Template routes should be defined as an array with a template key (['template' => 'template/path']) rather than a string ('template/path').

// Old:
'dashboard' => ['action' => 'dashboard/index'],
'settings/fields/new' => 'settings/fields/_edit',
'settings/fields/edit/(?P<fieldId>\d+)' => 'settings/fields/_edit',
'blog/type/([^\/]+)' => 'blog/_type',

// New:
'dashboard' => 'dashboard/index',
'settings/fields/new' => ['template' => 'settings/fields/_edit'],
'settings/fields/edit/<fieldId:\d+>' => ['template' => 'settings/fields/_edit'],
'blog/type/<type:[^\/]+>' => ['template' => 'blog/_type'],

Some PHP constants have been deprecated in Craft 3, and will no longer work in Craft 4:

¹ Craft 3 doesn’t require each site/locale to have its own index.php file anymore, so alternatively you can remove all unnecessary site/locale web roots and subfolders. See the new Localization guide for more info.

Craft 3 still supports static message translations, but the directory structure has changed. Now within your translations/ folder, you should create subdirectories for each locale, and within them, PHP files for each translation category.

The acceptable translation categories are:

In Craft 3, your translations/ folder might look something like this:

translations/
└── de/
    ├── app.php
    └── site.php

User photos are stored as assets now. When upgrading to Craft 3, Craft will automatically create a new asset volume called “User Photos” at storage/userphotos/ (where Craft previously stored all user photos, but without the <Username>/ subfolders). However this folder is above your web root and inaccessible to HTTP requests, so until you make this volume publicly accessible, user photos will not work on the front end.

Here’s how you can resolve this:

1. Move the storage/userphotos/ folder somewhere below your web root (e.g. web/userphotos/)
2. Go to Settings → Assets → Volumes → User Photos and configure the volume based on the new folder location:
   • Update the File System Path setting to point to the new folder location
   • Enable the “Assets in this volume have public URLs” setting
   • Set the correct URL setting for the folder
   • Save the volume

Craft 3 uses Twig 2, which has its own breaking changes for templates:

Twig 2 requires that you explicitly import macros in each template where you are using them. They are no longer automatically available if a parent template is including them, or even if they were defined in the same template file.

Old:
{% macro foo %}...{% endmacro %}
{{ _self.foo() }}

New:
{% macro foo %}...{% endmacro %}
{% import _self as macros %}
{{ macros.foo() }}

Twig 1 let you call block() even for blocks that didn’t exist:

{% if block('foo') is not empty %}
    {{ block('foo') }}
{% endif %}

Twig 2 will throw an error unless it’s a defined test:

{% if block('foo') is defined %}
    {{ block('foo') }}
{% endif %}

The {% paginate %} tag no longer has an {% endpaginate %} closing tag, so remove any instances of that.

Some Twig template tags have been deprecated in Craft 3, and will be completely removed in Craft 4:

Some template functions have been removed completely:

¹ Only available if the queue component implements api:craft\queue\QueueInterface.

Some template functions have been deprecated in Craft 3, and will be completely removed in Craft 4:

¹ craft.app.request.isLivePreview is also deprecated, and only will return true when previewing categories or plugin-supplied element types that don’t support the new previewing system. If you were calling this to work around Craft templating bugs in Live Preview requests, you can simply delete the condition now, and treat Live Preview requests the same as any other request type.

Craft’s extended DateTime class has been removed in Craft 3. Here’s a list of things you used to be able to do in your templates, and what the Craft 3 equivalent is. (The DateTime object is represented by the d variable. In reality it could be entry.postDate, now, etc.)

The |currency filter now maps to api:craft\i18n\Formatter::asCurrency(). It still works the same, but the stripZeroCents argument has been renamed to stripZeros, and pushed back a couple notches, so you will need to update your templates if you were setting that argument.

Old:
{{ num|currency('USD', true) }}
{{ num|currency('USD', stripZeroCents = true) }}

New:
{{ num|currency('USD', stripZeros = true) }}

Some element query params have been removed:

Some element query params have been renamed in Craft 3. The old params have been deprecated, but will continue to work until Craft 4.

The limit param is now set to null (no limit) by default, rather than 100.

If you want to set a param value to an array, you now must type out the array brackets.

Old:
{% set query = craft.entries()
    .relatedTo('and', 1, 2, 3) %}

New:
{% set query = craft.entries()
    .relatedTo(['and', 1, 2, 3]) %}

In Craft 2, each time you call a parameter-setter method (e.g. .type('article')), the method would:

1. clone the ElementCriteriaModel object
2. set the parameter value on the cloned object
3. return the cloned object

That made it possible to execute variations of an element query, without affecting subsequent queries. For example:

{% set query = craft.entries.section('news') %}
{% set articleEntries = query.type('article').find() %}
{% set totalEntries = query.total() %}

Here .type() is applying the type parameter to a clone of query, so it had no effect on query.total(), which will still return the total number of News entries, regardless of their entry types.

This behavior has changed in Craft 3, though. Now any time you call a parameter-setter method, the method will:

1. set the parameter value on the current element query
2. return the element query

Which means in the above code example, totalEntries will be set to the total Article entries, as the type parameter will still be applied.

If you have any templates that count on the Craft 2 behavior, you can fix them using the clone() function.

{% set query = craft.entries.section('news') %}
{% set articleEntries = clone(query).type('article').all() %}
{% set totalEntries = query.count() %}

The findElementAtOffset() element query method has been removed in Craft 3. Use nth() instead.

Some element query methods have been renamed in Craft 3. The old methods have been deprecated, but will continue to work until Craft 4.

Support for treating element queries as if they’re arrays has been deprecated in Craft 3, and will be completely removed in Craft 4.

When you need to loop over an element query, you should start explicitly calling .all(), which will execute the database query and return the array of results:

Old:
{% for entry in craft.entries.section('news') %}...{% endfor %}
{% for asset in entry.myAssetsField %}...{% endfor %}

New:
{% for entry in craft.entries.section('news').all() %}...{% endfor %}
{% for asset in entry.myAssetsField.all() %}...{% endfor %}

When you need to get the total number of results from an element query, you should call the .count() method:

Old:
{% set total = craft.entries.section('news')|length %}

New:
{% set total = craft.entries.section('news').count() %}

Alternatively, if you already needed to fetch the actual query results, and you didn’t set the offset or limit params, you can use the length filter to find the total size of the results array without the need for an extra database query.

{% set entries = craft.entries()
    .section('news')
    .all() %}
{% set total = entries|length %}

last() was deprecated in Craft 3 because it isn’t clear that it needs to run two database queries behind the scenes (the equivalent of query.nth(query.count() - 1)).

In most cases you can replace calls to .last() with .inReverse().one() and get the same result, without the extra database query. (inReverse() will reverse the sort direction of all of the ORDER BY columns in the generated SQL.)

{# Channel entries are ordered by `postDate DESC` by default, so this will swap
   it to `postDate ASC`, returning the oldest News entry: #}

{% set oldest = craft.entries()
    .section('news')
    .inReverse()
    .one() %}

There are two cases where inReverse() won’t work as expected, though:

• when there is no ORDER BY clause in the SQL, therefore nothing to reverse
• when the orderBy param contains a api:yii\db\Expression object

In those cases, you can just replace the .last() call with what it’s already doing internally:

{% set query = craft.entries()
    .section('news') %}
{% set total = query.count() %}
{% set last = query.nth(total - 1) %}

Tag elements no longer have a name property. Use title instead.

All elements’ locale properties have been deprecated, and will be completely removed in Craft 4. Use siteId if you need to know an element’s site ID, site.handle if you need to know its handle, or site.language if you need to know its site’s language.

Models’ getError('attribute') methods have been deprecated, and will be completely removed in Craft 4. Use getFirstError('attribute') instead.

Some locale methods have been deprecated in Craft 3, and will be completely removed in Craft 4:

Your front-end <form>s and JS scripts that submit to a controller action will need to be updated with the following changes.

action params must be rewritten in kebab-case rather than camelCase.

Old:
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="entries/saveEntry">

New:
<input type="hidden" name="action" value="entries/save-entry">

Some controller actions have been renamed:

redirect params must be hashed now.

Old:
<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="foo/bar">

New:
<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value="{{ 'foo/bar'|hash }}">

The redirectInput() function is provided as a shortcut.

{{ redirectInput('foo/bar') }}

Some redirect param tokens have been renamed:

CSRF protection is enabled by default in Craft 3. If you didn’t already have it enabled (via the enableCsrfProtection config setting), each of your front-end <form>s and JS scripts that submit to a controller action will need to be updated with a new CSRF token param.

{% set csrfParam = craft.app.request.csrfParam %}
{% set csrfToken = craft.app.request.csrfToken %}
<input type="hidden" name="{{ csrfParam }}" value="{{ csrfToken }}">

The csrfInput() function is provided as a shortcut.

{{ csrfInput() }}

See Updating Plugins for Craft 3.