Posted by on October 22nd, 2025

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The Backdrop CMS community is pleased to announce the release of version 1.31.0 of Backdrop CMS. This update continues our regular 4-month release cycle and delivers new features, improved editor functionality, and updated underlying platform support.
View the release on GitHub »

Notes for Updating

  • No changes were made to settings.php, .htaccess, or robots.txt in this release — if you have customized those files, updating them is not necessary.
  • The database update script at /core/update.php does not need to be run.
  • Important: As a prerequisite for supporting PHP 8.4, Backdrop CMS has dropped support for PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.0.
    Make sure your server is running a newer version of PHP before updating.
    The recommended version is PHP 8.3, since some contributed modules may still be adapting to PHP 8.4.

What’s New in 1.31.0

New Features

  • Allow Image Styles to be used with inline images in the WYSIWYG editor (CKEditor).
    See issue #2658.
  • Provide CKEditor 5 Emoji integration.
    See issue #6772.
  • Allow attaching libraries (JS, CSS) via hook_theme.
    See issue #6859.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed issue where selecting another image while keeping an image style could lead to wrong dimensions.
    See issue #6896.
  • Fixed issue where width and height did not get reset when uploading a new inline image.
    See issue #6895.

Version Updates / Platform Support

  • Added support for PHP 8.4.
    See issue #6777.
  • Updated CKEditor 5 to version 44.3.0.
    See issue #6788.

Why Upgrade?

This release brings enhancements to the content editing experience, including inline image styling and emoji support in CKEditor 5.
With support for modern PHP versions, Backdrop sites will benefit from improved performance, better security, and long-term stability.
Site maintainers running older PHP versions should plan an upgrade path to maintain compatibility and take advantage of these improvements.

Where to Get Help

For discussions, questions, and community support around upgrading or troubleshooting, please visit the Backdrop community forum:
https://forums.backdropcms.org/

We encourage all Backdrop site maintainers and developers to update to version 1.31.0 at their earliest convenience (after verifying compatibility of contributed modules and themes).
Thank you to all contributors and community members for making this release possible!

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