Bye 2023, Hello 2024! A year in review

Before we get into celebrations and upcoming innovations, I wish you, on behalf of the Strapi team, a Happy New Year! May 2024 bring you health and success in every personal or professional project you want to build and grow!

2023 has been such a productive year! The project has reached new milestones:

• 🌟 58k stars on GitHub (134th most starred repository, add yours!) 🌟
• ⏬ From 2M to 4M annual downloads on npm
• 🏗️ 936 contributors
• ⚡️ 1307 issues closed
• ⬆️ 6,448 commits pushed
• ✅ 298 pull requests merged
• 📣 21,381 community members on Discord

What a ride! Let's go over all the great things that happened in 2023 together. 🚀

Community

StrapiConf is our annual global user conference. For the 2023 edition, we were proud to bring the spotlight on amazing Strapi Community members, partners, users or customers. In case you missed it, check out how:

• Tesco built a 500k audience multi-channel solution on top of Strapi 
• Sonos deployed Strapi to reach new markets
• Bash powers multi-channel e-commerce with Strapi to go live in 7 months

You can also find all the talk recordings directly on the Strapi YouTube channel.

60 new plugins were published on Strapi Market, which now totalizes 166 extensions. The most downloaded community plugins include:

• Import/Export Entries, by Baboo
• Translate, by Felix Haase
• Responsive image, by Nicolas Hamelin

Product

Strapi is greater than ever, thanks to many improvements:

• Data Transfer: Easily import, export, and transfer content from one environment (ex. local/development) to another (ex., staging or production).
• Review Workflows: Review content before it is published.
• Custom Roles became free: Role-based Access Control, including Custom Roles, became 100% free.
• TypeScript: From now on, you can customize your Strapi project (both the API and the admin panel) using TypeScript.
• Bulk Publish: Publish multiple entries at the same time.
• Rich Text Editor: Easy to use rich text editor.
• v5: We also made significant progress on Strapi v5 (more details below).
• And more!

As much as your favorite open-source Headless CMS became better and better, 2023 definitely was the year of Strapi Cloud!

Since the creation of Strapi, it has been possible to deploy Strapi on any server or Cloud. With all of the benefits that come with this, it includes some challenges to handle: setting up servers (application, database, assets, etc.), managing security, scalability, etc. This might result in a lot of hidden financial and human costs. Strapi Cloud removes all of this complexity, by being the easiest platform to host, and scale, Strapi projects.

Strapi Cloud has been a fantastic success. We received a ton of positive feedback, and the numbers speak for themselves: Give Strapi Cloud a try!

As a business, we are glad we raised our Series B last year. This, combined with the massive growth of Strapi Cloud and the Enterprise Edition, guarantees the sustainability of the project, which is essential for all of the Strapi users. I am very comfortable to say Strapi is a solution you can very confidently rely on for all of your future projects.

The self-hosted Enterprise Edition (which includes SSO, Audit Logs, Review Workflows, Releases - soon, Content History - soon, and support) of Strapi has been a fantastic success since we started selling it in 2020. We see so much demand for Strapi Cloud that we are now shifting our efforts to the Cloud. We believe this is great not only for Strapi's sustainability but, even more importantly, for the community: it allows us to grow our revenue while limiting the number of paid features (hosting the CMS being necessary for anyone using a CMS).

Company

We are now 78 Strapiers in the team, working 100% remotely, located in 13 different countries, for a total of 23 nationalities! 

In June, we spent a fantastic week together, in person. For an all-remote organization like Strapi, it is essential to better know each other. The event was a perfect mix of inspiring workshops (cross-team collaboration, etc.) and, even more importantly, a ton of delightful moments! Strapiers organized amazing activities, such as karaoke, tea making, meditation (so relaxing that I fell asleep!), solidarity world tour, movie watching, soccer, darts, guinguette, and dance party. It was so much fun!

What's planned for 2024?

We have one objective for 2024: To make the Editing and Deployment Experience seamless.

Editing Experience

Get ready for massive updates!

On top of their ability to manage content on multiple platforms, Headless CMSs were primarily created because developers want to use modern frontend frameworks. React, Next.js, Vue, Nuxt.js, Svelte, Angular, you name it. Say bye to old, slow, unmaintainable, monolith CMS templating systems. Instead, these modern frameworks allow developers to build more performant websites through a fantastic Developer Experience. Developers and businesses benefit from this new architecture, as higher performance results in better SEO, better User Experience, and stronger conversion rates.

By splitting the frontend and the CMS, the Editing Experience is not as great as it could be. Editors (and certainly developers) miss live previews, inline editing, etc. We will fix that. 2024 will be dedicated to unifying the frontend and the CMS, to offer a fantastic Editing Experience.

We will do this through a brand new JavaScript/TypeScript SDK, which will leverage the power of frontend frameworks, such as Next.js, to allow you to edit the content directly from within your frontend application.

On top of this massive update, we will introduce significant improvements to Strapi. v5 will be live by the end of Q2, with solid updates: full TypeScript support, the ability to have a draft version of an already published entry, Vite instead of Webpack, simpler API format (bye "data.attributes"), and more!

We will release top-notch features, such as Releases (publish multiple entries, at a defined date and time, simultaneously) and Content History (see the previous versions of an entry and rollback within one click).

We will also allow nested components and release conditional fields.

Deployment seamless

We received fantastic feedback about Strapi Cloud, and look forward to making it even better! First, we will release a cheaper tier, which will start as low as $29/month. As much as we want to unify the frontend and the CMS, we will make Strapi and Strapi Cloud one single experience. We want to make using Strapi extremely easy. To do so, we will introduce a CLI that will deploy every Strapi project in seconds with an extremely fast build time. We will add a multiple environments feature.

This is quite a list of improvements, right?

Ready for 2024? 🚀

We are more excited than ever about the future of Strapi, so we hope you are 🤓

2024 will be a fantastic year for Strapi. Looking forward to building this together with you!

Looking forward to celebrating 2023 achievements together and knowing more about what's next in 2024? Register here for the Community Call we will have today (Jan 9, 2024)!