Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023!

Str’Happy New Year to all who celebrated the start of 2023 on January 1st 🎉

On behalf of the Strapi team, I wish you all the best for this new year. May 2023 bring you health, happiness, and great content (management)!

2022 was a big year for Strapi, with insane achievements and metrics:

• 🚀1M projects created in one year
• 📈1.25M users edited content
• ⏬Growing from 2M to 3.25M+ annual downloads
• 🌟From 32K to 50K GitHub stars (129th most starred repository, add yours!) 🌟
• ⚡️1,619 issues closed
• ⬆️6,101 commits pushed
• ✅1,331 pull requests merged
• 👋🏽14,631 features request votes, 497 posts, and 851 comments on our public roadmap
• 📣15,369 community members on Discord
• 💰$31M Series B raised
• 🤩48 new teammates in 17 countries

What. A. Year. 🫣

2022 in review 👀

Community

2022 started with a bang following the release of Strapi v4 (December 2021), which brought tons of performance improvements and customization capabilities based on a new Plugin API and Design System. Although a bit later than we had initially planned, we then provided v3 to v4 migration scripts and guides. In the future, we’ll ensure these guides and scripts come with the release.

In March, we had the most awaited event of the year: StrapiConf. Through the “Building Faster. Together.” theme, we announced Strapi Market, Custom Fields, Dark Mode, TypeScript, and Strapi Cloud (currently in beta). To reiterate our honest commitment to open-source, we sponsored and facilitated donations to open-source projects and Strapi plugins through Open Collective.

Strapi wouldn’t be anything without its community, which is very much represented by its Community Stars. The Write for the Community program resulted in 148 new articles being published, for a total of 1.3M views. 2022 was also the year of the launch of the Strapi Community Organization, a group of community members dedicated to empowering initiatives and highlighting them. Boaz, Mattie, Sacha, and Simen have been invaluable contributors to the Strapi Community, going above and beyond by developing open-source plugins and tools. Strapi config-sync plugin, mattie-strapi-bundle (for search), Strapi REST cache plugin, Dockerize tool, and more!

Based on our vision for building more than a CMS but an entire ecosystem and plugins, integrations, and partners, we released Strapi Market: the official Strapi marketplace. Less than a year after its publication, more than 100 plugins and providers developed by the community have been reviewed and are already available, including CKEditor, Cloudinary, and Stripe, to name a few.

As a result, the project reached a significant milestone: 50k stars on GitHub. This makes Strapi part of the 150 most starred repositories out of 30M+ that are public on GitHub.

Product

Last year has been a flood of key improvements through 200+ releases:

• 🌁 Media Library (with folders): Manage assets at scale.
• 🔐 API Tokens: Secure your content.
• 💅 Logo Customization: Your CMS, your logo.
• 🖤 Dark Mode: Choose your side of the force.
• 🚶🏽Guided Tour: Easily discover the power of Strapi.
• 🛍Marketplace: Discover and share the most awesome plugins.
• 📏Resizable Fields: The Content Experience you’ve been dreaming about.
• ✅TypeScript: Define your type, even if you don’t have any.
• 🔗Custom Fields: From color picker to Shopify fields, manage any type of content. From any source.
• ☁️Strapi Cloud: A fully managed, composable, and collaborative platform to boost your team velocity. Join the waiting list!

Company

We raised a successful $31M Series B with top-tier investors (CRV, Guillermo Rauch - CEO of Vercel, Nat Friedman - Former GitHub CEO, Nicolas Dessaigne - Founder of Algolia, Matt Biilmann Christensen - Netlify CEO) to make the project sustainable and even better.

Our team grew to 85 amazing Strapiers. We live in 17 countries and love celebrating our team's diversity.

We are a 100% remote organization. Chatting on Slack and GMeet every day is great, but we were looking forward to meeting in person, which we did in June by doing an incredible offsite in Lisbon, Portugal!

2023: What’s coming next? 🛣

The mission of Strapi is to empower millions of people to share and manage any content, anywhere.

To move toward this mission, 2023 will be dedicated to Cloud and Content.

Cloud

When we created Strapi in 2015, it was evident that any CMS should be open-source. This way, developers (who build the Head) can customize the software and make any project a success, content managers can connect to any other tool through plugins developed by a community, and companies can host their content on their own servers or cloud to embrace real data privacy. The past few years confirmed our intuition. Although many developers are happy to self-host their CMS, others look for a fully managed experience.

This is why we started building Strapi Cloud and are making it a top priority for this new year. Strapi Cloud will make using Strapi seamless. Our ambition is to provide the easiest way to enjoy Strapi in production. Strapi Cloud will help you focus on what matters: boost your content velocity. It will handle everything for you (server, database, storage, backups, CDN, CI/CD, logs); you don't have to worry about making a single choice. Everything is optimized to ensure your Strapi project will be in production in the best way possible.

Looking forward to giving it a try? Join the waiting list: https://strapi.io/cloud

Content

It became crystal clear that Headless is the future of Content Management. Companies need to display content on plenty of platforms, and developers want to build faster websites that perform using frontend frameworks. Although Headless CMSes have become the standard for developers, content managers are not fully convinced (yet) by the content management experience compared to traditional CMSes.

If Headless is the Body, it’s time to reconcile it with the Head. We want to provide the best Editing Experience out there, with delightful Collaboration capabilities.

Some extremely exciting improvements are already in advanced progress and will be released in the first half of this year:

• Data Import Export & Transfer across environments
• SDK (for seamless previews)
• Audit logs
• Relation Reordering
• Responsive Admin Panel
• Reviews Workflows
• And much more

Ready? 🚀

2022 was such an amazing year for Strapi. Strapi wouldn’t be anything without its community. Thank you so much for your feedback and contributions.

As you have seen, 2023 will be even more exciting! Massive improvements are coming, with a solid focus on Cloud and Content. Looking forward to it 🚀