Craft CMS 5.2: Enhanced Live Preview and Easier Asset Management

Craft CMS 5.2 launched this week with improvements focused on making content editing more intuitive and efficient. If your team regularly previews content before publishing or works with lots of images, you’ll appreciate these changes.

Live Preview Gets Significantly Better

The biggest improvement in Craft 5.2 is to Live Preview - the feature that lets you see how content will look on your site before publishing. Previously, Live Preview had limitations around tabs, UI elements, and conditional fields. Version 5.2 removes those restrictions.

Now you can preview content with multiple tabs, see how conditional fields behave, and get an accurate representation of your final content regardless of how complex your content structure is. This makes Live Preview genuinely useful for sophisticated content models, not just simple pages.

There’s also a dedicated “Save” button in Live Preview now, so you don’t need to leave the preview mode to save your work. This small change makes the editing workflow feel more natural - preview, refine, save, preview again, all without context switching.

Faster Asset Alternative Text Editing

For sites that care about accessibility (which should be all sites), managing alternative text for images just got easier. You can now edit alt text directly from the Assets index page without opening each asset individually.

This is particularly useful when you’re processing a batch of images. Upload them, quickly add appropriate alt text for each one, and you’re done. What used to require opening and closing dozens of asset editor screens now happens right on the index page.

See What’s Changed Before Publishing

Element cards now display provisional changes with an “Edited” label. This means you can see at a glance which content has been modified but not yet published. For editorial workflows where content goes through review before going live, this visual indicator helps everyone understand the current state of content.

You don’t need to open each entry to check if changes are pending - the card view tells you immediately.

Improved Mobile Interface

Craft 5.2 continues the mobile improvements from 5.1 with better styling across the control panel. Slideouts look cleaner, table views work better on smaller screens, and the overall experience is more polished when you need to manage content from a tablet or phone.

What This Means for Content Teams

These improvements are all about workflow efficiency. Live Preview becomes more reliable and useful, alt text management becomes faster, and you can see the status of content at a glance. None of these are revolutionary changes, but collectively they make daily content management work smoother.

If your team produces a lot of content or manages complex content structures, the enhanced Live Preview is worth the update alone. Being able to see exactly how content will appear, with all tabs and conditional logic working correctly, makes the preview feature genuinely useful rather than approximately helpful.

Regular Updates Keep Your Site Current

Updates like Craft 5.2 arrive regularly - typically every few months. Each one brings incremental improvements that make the platform better to use. Staying current with these updates means your content team always has access to the latest usability enhancements.

Through our website maintenance support packages, we apply these updates monthly, handle any compatibility issues with plugins or custom code, and ensure everything continues working smoothly. You get the benefits of new features without managing the update process.

If you have a Craft site and want help keeping it current with releases like 5.2, or if you need support managing your content infrastructure, email us at hello@mutual.agency.

Content management should support your workflow, not fight it. Craft 5.2’s improvements to Live Preview and asset management are practical enhancements that make content teams more efficient - and that’s the kind of update worth applying.