In our ongoing journey towards continuous innovation and delivering unparalleled value, we're excited to share insights into the evolution of our Evergreen model, the strategic decision to sunset LTS designations, and our ambitious roadmap centered on observability and action. This blog post will delve into how these changes are empowering our customers with greater speed, transparency, and the tools to thrive in an ever-evolving digital landscape, reflecting on past achievements and looking ahead to future advancements.
A Look Back: The Evergreen Transition
Our goal was simple: to deliver innovation to you faster and more reliably. We went all-in on an Evergreen model, where instead of waiting for periodic major releases, you receive continuous updates all delivered seamlessly.
The results speak for themselves, in the last year, we’ve seen a 40% increase in dotCMS cloud customer environments getting releases at least every two weeks.
This rapid adoption is a testament to the stability and value these continuous updates provide. This fundamentally transforms how our customers manage their content and deliver it to their audiences for greater impact.
For our customers, this has ushered in a new era of speed and transparency. Key benefits you're already experiencing include:
Smaller, More Predictable Upgrades: Previously, major "Big Bang" upgrades demanded substantial investment from our customers. No more 4-6 week "freeze periods," months-long waits, or enormous coordination efforts for dotCMS upgrades.
Continuous Improvement: Benefit from bi-weekly updates that deliver new features and performance enhancements, providing more immediate value for your investment
Enhanced Security: Your environment is secure by design with autonomous patches, defense-in-depth, and secure-by-default configurations. Bi-weekly updates provide rapid, automated vulnerability scanning, continuous compliance, and proactive patching for evolving security.
Seamless Scaling: Configuration changes and scaling operations are now completely transparent and applied with zero downtime, ensuring no disruption to your site traffic or user sessions.
Unprecedented Speed: New environments and configuration changes that used to take weeks to provision are now ready in minutes.
Announcing The End Of LTS Designations
As part of our full commitment to the Evergreen model, we are officially designating LTS 25.07 as our final Long-Term Support release. We want to assure our customers currently on this version that we will continue to offer LTS support, including security patches and critical bug fixes, through the end of March 2027. This decision allows us to focus all of our innovative efforts on the Evergreen platform, ensuring we're delivering the best possible experience and the most advanced features to you faster than ever before.
As the chart shows, each new LTS has lower adoption than the last. That’s not a crisis—it’s a signal. Evergreen’s stability and continuous, low‑risk updates have made “wait for the next LTS” less compelling for most teams.
So we’re focusing where it matters:
Reliability with clear SLOs/SLAs, error‑budget governance, and solid incident posture.
Resilience with blast‑radius reduction (cell/zone isolation, feature flags) and graceful failure that degrades non‑critical paths while preserving core availability.
Zero‑downtime upgrades via progressive delivery (canary/blue‑green), automated health gates, and rollback‑ready releases.
Better self‑service tooling, so teams move faster without hand‑holding.
For those interested in self-hosting in an Evergreen world, refer to [this blog post sharing some tips and best practices](https://dev.dotcms.com/docs/managing-evergreen-on-premise). We'll be sharing more tools and thoughts on that soon.
The Roadmap Ahead: An Era of Observability and Action
The move to an Evergreen model was just the beginning. It built the foundation for our next chapter, which is centered on a powerful theme: observability. Our goal is to give you unprecedented visibility into both your content and your platform, empowering you to make data-driven decisions that drive better outcomes.
A Modern Approach to Content Intelligence
Our vision for AI is fundamentally different. In a world awash with auto-generated content, our focus is on extending human expertise, not just creating more "AI slop." With dotAI, we are providing the tools to manage the entire content lifecycle—from insightful creation to observing what’s working and orienting your strategy with real-time Content Analytics. This is about amplifying the skills of your content teams, helping them build better content architecture and apply complex taxonomies with intelligent assistance.
A shining example of this is our Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which you can [read more about here](https://www.dotcms.com/blog/meet-the-mcp-server). Today, this brings an entirely new approach to managing content that can be enabled on a per-environment basis. As the post explains, all you need is an MCP client and the MCP server to tap into a more intelligent, governed, and flexible way to manage your content. Looking ahead, our roadmap includes enhancements to the MCP tools and embedding MCP server directly into the dotCMS core, meaning in the future, all you'll need is a client to unlock these new ways to manage content, leveraging providers like OpenAI, Azure, and Google Vertex AI to suit your enterprise needs. This combination allows you to run experiments, directly tie conversions to your content, and enable a truly outcome-based approach, ensuring your content is purposeful, not just plentiful.
Unparalleled Platform Visibility
Observability extends to the platform itself. We are providing deep insights into your dotCMS cloud environment's performance and capacity. This real-time data will empower you to make the best cost-performance tradeoffs, ensuring your implementation is optimized based on facts, not guesswork. This visibility is also a cornerstone of our commitment to making upgrades safer and more reliable, allowing them to be performed at any time without impacting your visitor traffic and user sessions.
Empowering Action with a Modern Editing Experience
Observing is only half the battle; you also need to be able to act. We are revolutionizing the authoring experience with Agentic Visual Editing. This frictionless workflow, combined with a modernized UI and a powerful style editor, will empower your content teams to act on insights quickly, launching and iterating on brand-aligned creative with greater freedom and speed.
It's important to note that this accelerated pace of innovation is exclusive to our Evergreen customers. All new features, from AI capabilities to the new editing experience, will be delivered directly to you through your bi-weekly updates and will not be backported to older LTS versions. This ensures you always have the most powerful, secure, and capable version of dotCMS.
Thank you for being on this journey with us. The move to Evergreen is a commitment to delivering value faster, and we're excited about the future of innovation we will build together. This journey is continuously improving how you manage and deliver your content, ensuring you always have the most powerful, secure, and capable version of dotCMS.