Monthly Update - January 2020

What could be a better way to start this new year than with a new feature announcement? I'm very proud to introduce a must-have feature and an important missing piece of the puzzle: Webhooks! The integration with front-end frameworks and libraries, or with CI/CD tools will be easier. To get more details, please read the dedicated blog post.

We recently started to write a new series of blog posts called "Community Spotlight", about community members who are truly amazing and deserve to be highlighted. The first one is dedicated to Derrick Mehaffy, the very first community member of Strapi.

Company

Two new teammates joined us this month! Please welcome Julien & Hicham, as our new Product Manager/Owner and Front-end developer, respectively. Thanks to them we will be able to ship faster.

Julien and his buddy Virginie in the Strapi's garden.

Hicham and his buddy Maxime in a remote photoshoot.

We are still looking for talented people to join the journey. If you believe in open-source and share our values, you should definitely submit your application.

• Senior Backend Engineer (Paris, or remotely from similar timezones)
• Technical Writer ("")
• Developer Advocate / Technical Community Manager ("")

Product

The roadmap has been recently updated (click here to see it). A new section "Maybe in 2020..." has been added in the "Planned" section. I'll certainly write a new Product Story blog post to explain how we manage and define the roadmap. Trust me, it's not that easy...

On top of shipping highly requested features, we also set ourselves a challenge this year: to improve Strapi stability. By stability, I mean the issues that are related to the developer experience (e.g the migrations of data across environments). We referenced more than 70 issues that we want to fix before removing the ßeta tag.

List of issues to fix before the stable version.

We will continue improving the flexibility of data structures in Strapi. In other words, we are going to add a way to manage static content (e.g pages) and a new type of fields (UID). It will be introduced with the Single Types. I'm proud to say that we kept a clean database structure without breaking any best practices or recommendations, despite the fact that the structure is super flexible.

We will thank ourselves in the future when we want to build indexes to optimize search performances or the speed of read-access to an entry in the database. It will also simplify the way to manage data migrations, and it will certainly avoid data losses, etc.

Then, the Media Library will be built on top of the current upload plugin. A media library is a must-have feature for a headless CMS and is part of the foundations.

Next, we will start to develop one of the two most asked features: the Administrators Roles & Permissions. If you want to get exclusive access to the feature, please send an email to victor.coisne[at]strapi.io to join the ßeta program.

However, we will remove the plugin "Users & Permissions" from the default installed plugins while generating a new project. The plugin will still be maintained but it won't be installed by default anymore. To keep a basic read/write access to the data, we will replace it with API tokens. It will let the project's administrators generate read AND/OR write tokens to Create/Read/Update/Delete entries for a specific list of content-types.

The Administrators & Permissions system will be built on top of the API token feature. Then, we will continue our journey by improving the content editors experience by allowing them to translate content in multiple languages, using a far more powerful Rich Text Editor where we will store an AST instead of raw markdown and providing an easy-to-use Draft/Archive system to write new content without publishing it.

Eventually, we plan to finish the year by tackling one of the most challenging issues: migration across environments. We know that you hate the "core_store" table. I can ensure you that it won't be an issue when the migration system will be developed. Everything will be automated and easy-to-use. We also listened to you to be able to keep track of the changes and migrations through files.

Conclusion

As you can see, this year is going to be crazy. Strapi won't be the same, the product will be stronger than ever, enterprise and production-ready!

Last week, we made the first Strapi Online Meetup, I'd the chance to be the first guest. Each month, Victor who hosts the meetup will invite someone to talk about a Strapi-related topic. If you want to watch the replay, click here.

Also, feel free to engage with us and ask any questions you have by posting a comment below. We look forward to answering you!

See you soon 👋

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