Sage v11 and Acorn v5 Released

What’s new in Sage v11

Vite for front-end builds

We’ve said goodbye to our previous build processes and introduced Vite for compiling and bundling Sage’s assets. Vite provides a lightning-fast development server with hot module replacement (HMR), and a straightforward production build process. It pairs seamlessly with Laravel’s Vite plugin and Laravel’s Vite facades.

Tailwind CSS v4

Tailwind is still baked in as our default utility-first CSS framework, updated now to Tailwind v4. Sage still remains flexible—if you’d rather use another CSS framework or traditional Sass, simply swap it out. We’ve updated our documentation with instructions to help you switch to an alternative.

Integration with Acorn v5

Sage 11 pairs includes Acorn v5 out of the box again. You’ll also notice that Acorn is now more configurable and can be booted in a more “Laravel-ish” way with Application::configure().

Additional improvements

• We’ve cleaned up our file structure to better align with modern Laravel conventions
• New and improved default theme.json generation for the WordPress block editor, including the mapping of your Tailwind config to WordPress design tokens

For more detail, check out Sage’s v11 Release Notes.

What’s new in Acorn v5

Laravel v12 Under the Hood

Acorn v5 pulls in Laravel v12 components, so you get the benefits of the newest framework features, improvements, and security updates.

New commands & features

• acorn:install command – Quickly setup Acorn’s post installer script for your project
• make:seeder command – An easy way to scaffold seeders in your WordPress projects
• New scheduling console commands – More parity with core Laravel for scheduled tasks

Streamlined boot & configuration

Acorn’s boot flow has been revamped. Rather than the old bootloader() helper, you can now configure your application with:

use Roots\Acorn\Application;

add_action('after_setup_theme', function () {
    Application::configure()
        ->withProviders([
            // ...
        ])
        ->boot();
}, 0);

This approach is more consistent with standard Laravel patterns.

Breaking changes

• PHP 8.2+ is required
• Laravel packages and dependencies have been bumped to ^12.0
• The experimental WordPress request handler flag has been removed
• If you rely on \Roots\Acorn\Bootloader, be sure to migrate to Application::configure().

See the Acorn v5 Release Notes for the full changelog, details on smaller fixes, and documentation updates.

Upgrading from v4

Check out the Acorn Upgrading Docs for more details.

Thank you

Thank you to our amazing contributors and the Roots community for testing and contributing to the development of Sage v11 and Acorn v5.

aksld, codewithfeeling, csorrentino, KIKOmanasijev, kinglouie, lis-marcin, marcelo2605, palicko, RafaelKr, ssang, tombroucke, trajche

Check out the full Sage docs or dive into Acorn’s documentation to get started or upgrade. As always, feel free drop into our community forums if you have any questions or feedback.

We look forward to seeing what you build with Sage v11 and Acorn v5!

— Ben Word, Brandon Nifong