Strapi beta 17.4: Speed and Convenience

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 💥:

yarn create strapi-app my-app