Elements CMS v2 is coming

Elements CMS v2 is launching soon. If you're running v1 already, this is a massive upgrade with new components and an online editor. If you've never tried Elements CMS, v2 is the version to start with.

What's new in v2?

The headline addition is the Online Editor, a browser-based WYSIWYG editing for your Elements CMS content. Open your published site, click into the editor, write a post, add an image, publish. No need to open Elements to update your site, and no Markdown files to edit by hand if you'd rather not. It's by far the most requested feature and something v1 never had.

Alongside the Editor, v2 ships with two new components: Comments, with a built-in approval workflow, and Search, with live full-text results and no external service required. Underneath all of that, the CMS core has been rewritten from scratch. It's now cleaner (a lot less files), faster, and better architected than v1. Existing users should notice the speed difference immediately.

AI, built in.

v2 also brings AI directly into the CMS in two ways. First, there's a built-in MCP server, which means you can point Claude (or any MCP-compatible client) at your site and have it list posts, draft new ones, update frontmatter, moderate comments, and manage tags and authors — all through natural conversation, without ever opening an admin UI. Second, the Online Editor ships with an AI writing assistant for drafting posts, rewriting paragraphs, generating titles and summaries, and tightening copy as you write. Both features are opt-in, and you just need to supply your own API key for whichever AI model you prefer.

V2 Pricing

A word on pricing: everything in the CMS is free, including the new components and the Online Editor itself. There's also an optional Online Editor Pro upgrade for teams, agencies, and anyone who needs version history, multi-user accounts, webhooks, and a few more advanced features, however, I want to stress that it's entirely optional.

The CMS itself remains free to use on all of your Elements projects.

Over the next week or so I'll post a closer look at what's inside v2, along with a walkthrough of getting started with the Online Editor. On launch day you'll be able to install v2 from the Elements Store for free and it will replace your existing v1 components automatically. No migration required, nothing to reconfigure.

Stay tuned over the coming days for more updates.