Inside the box - October, 2016

Welcome on the 3th "Inside box" article.

The last month has been very intense for us! We worked hard on the framework and the hosting solution. As you may know, great news are coming for Strapi. We will soon dedicate an entire post. We can't tell you more as long as it's not done!

About the v3

Framework layer advancements

We pushed a lot of work on the master branch. We added a new validation layer. We were inspired by the awesome work done on the Hapi framework. That's why, we decided to use Joi directly on the router. However, Strapi uses the JSON object syntax (see the related PR) for an easier configuration from a UI.

Then, we updated the dependencies in the core and external hooks. We chose to use koa-sslify instead of koa-ssl. This middleware is more maintained and more popular. It also offers more features such as Azure support and reverse proxies (see the related PR).

Finally, we merged the feature/plugins branch which is a big step for us (see the related PR). This work provides an alpha support for plugins. The plugins are loaded into the core framework (dictionary, config, router). A plugin is like a sub-app with its own controllers, models, services and assets. It has its own router but it can also override routes in the main router.

Administration panel advancements

We delayed the release of the administration panel. We have experienced some strange bugs to load plugins. We decided to not release it until it is stable.

Hosting platform

In our last post, we revealed that we are working on our own hosting solution to allow the community to deploy their Strapi's apps in seconds without any devOps' knowledge. One of us is fully dedicated to this platform and we are making good progress on it. Some of you will be able to test the platform before its official release. The other good news is that we will provide a free trial plan to everyone without credit card required.

Next steps

• Release the administration panel on GitHub
• Develop the first three plugins (Custom Content Builder, Content Manager, Settings Manager)
• Release the alpha version

How can I help you? Feel free to submit a PR or open an issue on GitHub. Send us an email at hi@strapi.io, if you need support or anything else, we will be glad to chat with you. Don’t hesitate to ping us on Slack.

Thanks for reading!