Goodbye 2020, Hello 2021!

Happy New Year to all who celebrated the start of 2021 on January 1st 🎉

The entire Strapi team wishes all the best to you, your loved ones, and actually, to the entire world, since we definitely want everything to be back to normal.

2020 has been such an unforgettable year! It has been a special one for sure. The COVID-19 pandemic has had dramatic consequences and is continuing to impact everyone and businesses all over the world. We’re looking forward to better days.

Not everything has been lost though. In fact, for Strapi, it has been the best year ever. We feel lucky and are extremely grateful for the support of our colleagues, investors, customers, partners, and the overall community of users.

Over the last 12 months, Strapi has grown:

• From Beta to Stable 💪
• From 300 to 600+ Contributors 😳
• From 20k to 30k+ GitHub Stars (add yours!) 🌟
• From 500k to 2M+ annual downloads 🚀
• From 12 to 25 new people in the Team (+5 that arrived in January and we’re still hiring) 😃

Strapi was also recognized with a Noonie award by Hackernoon as the JavaScript Innovation of the Year far and away selected by voters. We appreciate the votes from the technologists of the Hackernoon community. You make us proud and we promise to do the same for you.

2020 in review 👀

Community

As an open-source project, a vibrant community means everything to us. Strapi wouldn’t be the same without all your valuable feedback, contributions, and recommendations.

The repository has been super active:

• 300 new contributors
• 1277 pull-requests merged
• 11474 issues/PR comments
• 10k+ new GitHub Stars

The community members published 30 articles through the new Write for the Community program, contributing to a total of 115 posts on the blog! The new Strapi Awesome repository contains a curated list of the most amazing resources from the Strapi community. Also, the Strapi Community Stars has officially launched.

We also announced StrapiConf, a virtual conference that will take place on April 22nd, 2021 and bring together all the Strapi users, contributors, customers, and partners from all over the world for a day filled with Strapi learning, collaboration, and networking opportunities. The official schedule will be published soon but you can already pre-register and submit proposals today!

Tons of new resources are now available to make every Strapi user successful. Jim’s recipes made Strapi cooking easier for thousands of you. The documentation includes many more resources, including the new user guide for non-technical people. Furthermore, the new Forum centralizes all of your questions and responses so you can find solutions faster than ever.

Last but not least, we launched Strapi Academy, a great resource for the community to learn Strapi for free and develop their Strapi expertise and make the most out of it through advanced customization and plugins!

UPD. September 2021: Strapi Academy was temporarily closed. Learn more in this blog post.

A HUGE thanks to all of you for your contributions!

Product

Same time last year, Strapi was in beta and is now available through a stable production-ready version.

Many of the most requested features have been released:

• Administrator Roles & Permissions (aka RBAC): precisely define what administrators can do.
• Media Library: manage assets at scale.
• Single Types made Strapi the most flexible Headless CMS.
• UUID Field: create slug or similar fields.
• Draft & Publish: draft your thoughts and make it live when it is ready.
• Templates: start with a use-case ready project.
• Starters: get up and running in a minute.
• Relation fields: see related entries from the list view and filter as you need.

Is there any feature you haven’t tried yet? You should definitely update your projects or create a new one:

npx create strapi-app my-app --quickstart

Company

New website and branding

We completely revamped our logo and website design while keeping our rocket to reach the moon and beyond.

Series A

We raised a $10m Series A with some of the best investors who truly believe in open-source.

Enterprise Edition

To make Strapi both enterprise-ready and sustainable, we published the Enterprise Edition of Strapi and made the Bronze Edition free for all students, non-profit organizations as well as open-source projects.

Team

Like every company, the pandemic changed the way we work together. We switched from a remote-friendly to a remote-first organization. Strapiers are now in 4 different countries: the US, France, Spain, and even Zambia. By the way, we are still hiring.

Despite the difficult context, the entire team has been absolutely amazing. Congrats to all of them!

This list of achievements is obviously non-exhaustive. Tons of other improvements happened within these 12 months.

2021: What’s coming next? 🛣

From the beginning, the mission of Strapi has been to empower the community to build millions of projects.

To move forward with this vision, we defined 3 priorities for 2021:

• Product
• Community
• Ecosystem

Product

You added thousands of upvotes to the public roadmap, feedback on GitHub, and comments in the forum.

Based on your insights, we prioritized the following items:

• SSO: authenticate admin users using your favorite user management system.
• Content Internationalization: translate your content in many locales.
• API Tokens: easily secure your API, with granularity.

Our top priorities will be to improve the Developer Experience and the Content Editing Experience while structuring our community ecosystem with better integrations.

Community

What will make the success of Strapi is not the product itself: it’s you, the Strapi community. You make Strapi successful when you talk about Strapi, when you contribute, when you share your feedback, etc. We owe you everything and are forever grateful.

Transparency

We want the team and the community to move forward as a single group.

We will provide as much visibility as possible into what we're developing, so you can easily anticipate what's coming next and participate as you see fit. To do so, we will share more RFCs, release a brand new plugin API (see below), and Design System.

External contributions

These contributions can be in the source code, the documentation, but also new articles, events, etc.

We’ll continue making things easy to give you the ability to make Strapi the project you want to be.

Ecosystem

Plugins are what made the most-used traditional CMSs so powerful and successful.

Having an excellent product is great. Being able to extend and customize it through plugins is a game-changer.

Imagine all the things you will be able to do with Custom Fields i.e select a location, retrieve products from Shopify, synchronize your content with Elastic or Algolia, connect to your own CRM, etc.

Most of these are currently possible through customization, but the plugin system deserves its stable API.

By the end of the year, we will release an official Plugin API which will give you the possibility to install plugins and develop your own plugins with ease and confidence.

For the same reasons, we will also improve our Design System so you can build extensions while benefiting from components having the same design as the rest of the admin panel.

Ready? 🚀

Does this sound like a great plan for you? Is there anything else you would like from Strapi? Please share your feedback in the comments.

Looking forward to the upcoming announcements? We need you. Please share this post so it will encourage both the community and the team to make Strapi the future of content management.

And again, Happy New Year! It’s gonna be another great one for the Strapi community, the perfect time to get involved!