Monthly Update March 2020

Even if we try to not think about what's happening right now globally, it still feels different. At Strapi, we are very lucky, we designed the processes to allow everyone in the team to work remotely where and when they want. In other words, the roadmap and the pace of feature releases won’t be impacted.

We hosted our third webinar to explain what the different options to deploy Strapi are, with our beloved community member Derrick Mehaffy, Jim Laurie (CTO @ Strapi) and Victor Coisne. Don't hesitate to watch it in replay— it’s free!

Everything you need to know about Strapi deployment options | Strapi

Company

We are thrilled to welcome Jean-Sébastien (aka JS) as a backend developer and John as a content manager! JS will help us to release the stable version, ship more features and facilitate the customization, while John will tell you all you need to know about the JAMStack, the CMS ecosystem, and much more.

Jean-Sebastien joining Strapi!

We are very excited to see the team growing, and we are still looking for more talented people. If you want to be part of the journey, send us through your application!.

• Technical Writer (Paris, or in remote in Europe only)

Product

At the beginning of the month, we released the Single Type feature. Since then, we have received a lot of great feedback from the community. The Single Type is a new structure to manage static content such as a homepage or any other unique page. It was a big missing piece of our data structure. I'm very proud that we designed this new feature, as always, with flexibility in mind. Whatever the content you want to manage and the use case (mobile app, corporate website, blog, IoT), Strapi can handle it!

We also introduced a new type of field called UID. It provides an easy way to generate unique URL-friendly identifier. The simplest usage is to generate a slug. Strapi offers a way to attach the UID field to another field to automatically generate a UID based on the attached field.

More details in the release post here.

There are many hot topics right now in the pipeline. First, the Media Library is almost ready and should be released at the end of the month! It includes a bunch of functionalities such as:

• Single or multiple uploads
• Upload from an URL or the computer
• Live-edit with cropping capabilities
• SEO-friendly with metadata (slug, alternative text, caption, and notes)
• Size optimization without quality loss
• Responsive-friendly with multiple formats (large, medium, small) available for a picture
• Thumbnail generation
• Video preview (only if the provider is compatible)
• Built-in sorting, filtering and pagination
• Reorder the assets in a field
• Download and copy/paste link shortcuts

It's a major milestone for the product and the users. The initial need was the ability to reuse an asset in multiple entries at the same time. We wanted to push forward and we try our best to deliver the feature a CMS deserves in 2020. I'm so excited and can't wait to hear the feedback on this one!

Secondly, we also started to work on the API token feature. This feature will allow adding a token to securely retrieve content from the API.

We want to enhance the developer experience and be better integrated with any SSG, like Gatsby, Eleventy, Next.js, etc...

Quick preview of the API token prototype.

Last but not least, we are currently working on the Users, Roles and Permissions system. This feature is highly requested and the need is pretty simple: restrict access to specific parts of the administration for some users. Also called RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), we will implement it as a PBAC (Policy-Based Access Control). Nothing will be hard-coded in the core or GUI.

It's part of the ßeta program. If you want to get exclusive access to the feature, please contact Victor. The feature will be released in July.

Here is what we have in mind:

• Unlimited users (community and enterprise edition).
• Field-granularity.
• Each user can have multiple roles.
• Release the foundations of the Draft/Publish system at the same time.
• Internal API to let plugins define default permissions.

Conclusion

In summary, in the last three months, we highly increased our development velocity to ship more features! Without forgetting the stable version, and all the issues fixes, we are on the right path to make Strapi the best Headless CMS. Our top priority is still to make our users happy, understand their needs and make sure we are providing the best product!

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 👋