If you follow the Strapi news, you probably saw some news about the company. Meanwhile, the product team was also busy fixing and improving a bunch of new stuff for you.

This time around, the bar has been raised on:

• 🏎 Performance: a new structure to build your project faster,
• 💆‍♂️ Convenience: new features to enhance your developer experience,
• 💅 Admin Development: you can now customize easily the admin panel to fit your needs.

🏎 Performance

First up, a cool modification. Strapi beta.17.4 introduces a key improvement that allows you to cut down the installation time!

This performance improvement has been made possible by removing node-sass in the administration panel (#4122). By doing so, the number of dependencies has been reduced and so are the project creation and build time.

This is a very important improvement as on average, the delay between the moment you type yarn create strapi-app my-app in your terminal and the moment your project starts has been reduced by 30%. The build time itself has been reduced by 70%!

Oh and we also pimped up the CLI 💅

💆‍♂️ Convenience

Another great improvement is the ability to add a GraphQL login/register where you could only use REST before. This is great news for our GraphQL users that download the graphQL plugin 15K times each month. Thanks to KalanyuZ for his contribution and to Kriskator and to Veit Bjarsch for the review.

You can also fully use policies now. When a policy is triggered via a GraphQL route, it was not possible to read the query parameters which made it impossible to perform some policies such as verifying ownership of documents.

Well, now it's possible!

This great improvement by donmasakayan will make it easier to customize your project.

💅 Admin Development

Last but not least, admin development has been a recurring and highly requested feature. This is why we set up a tutorial to explain how you can do it through an example using the WYSIWYG editor in Strapi. In this example, we change the draftjs editor by CKEditor.

You can check the full tutorial on the Strapi blog.

🐛 Bug Kills

Here's the trophy case of the bugs have been squashed 🔫 with some breaking changes 💥:

• 💥 Remove node-sass in the administration panel
• 💥 Remove strapi-plugin-settings-manager
• 🔫 Lock mongoose version to be 5.7.4
• 🔫 Fix multiple query in one graphql request
• 🔫 Added resolverOf and plugin key to graphql schema
• 🔫 Check if many-many relation is populated before loading it
• 🔫 Allow empty default on group attributes
• 🔫 Fix cuts the content in WYSIWYG not reflecting on saving
• 🔫 Fix groups creation/update not working with null groups
• 🔫 Fix err.stderr not defined in quickstart
• 🔫 Escape MongoDB password
• 💥 Fix Cloudinary deletion of other files than images
• 🔫 Fix image url when using a third party
• 🔫 Fix images not respecting configurable being set as false
• 💥 Pass graphql full context to custom queries
• 🔫 Create a dataloader for every model
• 🔫 Fix mutation resolver name selecter
• 💥 Fix forgot password url
• 🔫 Fix search error with "%" symbol
• 🔫 Fix startup race condition by disabling reload when writing jwt.json

Upgrade to beta.17.4

A fully detailed migration guide is available.

If you are new to Strapi, just give it a try!

Take a look at the Getting Started guide to jump on board, or get started with the following command lines:

yarn create strapi-app my-app

Thanks to all the Super-Strapiers that contributed

Strapi is a product of over 250 community committers. Strapi beta.17 contains code contributions from the following people: @JelmerV-WFC, @kalanyuz, @sajjad-shirazy, @Alonski, @websocket98765, @forethoughtde, @ivoba, @FailedSitcom, @DKvistgaard, @jontey, @talentedunicorn, @slatham, @veitbjarsch, @dandv, @lasseborly, and @lklion.

Contributing is easy! If you want to get involved, contact us to get started, we'll put you on the right path!

What's next?

We have a great roadmap ahead and Aurélien explained it very clearly on his latest blog post. Check it out if you missed it!