Monthly Update October 2019

I'm so excited to share what the team has been cooking for you! The last month was pretty intense, we did 7 releases and fixed more than 56 issues. The most important one was, for sure, the release of our latest feature, the "Repeatable Groups." If you didn't read it, I recommend you to take a look at this excellent article.

Company

Last week, we announced a $4M Seed Round, this round will help us to continue to improve the product, deliver new features, grow the core team and the community. Working with investors that understand the open-source vision will reinforce our commitment to the open-source product that we are co-building with you.

In the meantime, we have moved to new premises. It means a lot to us. Since 2016, we have been in 7 different offices. We are flexible and don't mind moving, but I have to say: there is no better feeling than being at home. It is also the first time that we don't share offices with other startups.

We are now ready to properly welcome new Strapiers in the team. If you read this blog post, you might be the next! Please have a look at the current open positions and apply to join us in our mission.

Product

As you can see, the company has been quite lively and so does the product! Here are the most significant enhancements, fixes, or improvements we made this month:

• Improve GraphQL performance (see #4158)
• Fix security breach (x-forwarded-host header) (see #3822)
• Preview images and files instantly from the list view
• Release the "Repeatable Groups" feature

For more details, please see the detailed changelog.

Roadmap

So far, we are on time to deliver the features we planned for the end of the year. The principal objective is to give more flexibility to our users by optimizing the data structures. As a headless CMS, Strapi is used for a significant number of different use cases. We must provide multiple kinds of data structure to allow a smooth user experience Strapi whatever the usage is.

1. Dynamic Zones with Components
2. Webhooks
3. Static Content-Types
4. Media Library

As you can see, we plan to release the stable version in the second half of January. The data structure is the last significant breaking change and challenge we have to tackle in the core. We are now confident enough we will release a stable version, then we will follow the SemVer versioning.

In terms of features and enhancements, we will introduce the Static Content-Types, the Dynamic Zones, and the Components concepts.

Components

In the latest version, we introduced a new concept, the Repeatable Groups. The next version will include the development of Dynamic Zones, and we will probably rename the repeatable groups Components, to make it easily understandable to every user. So what is a Component?

A component is a data structure that you can reuse in any other Content-Type. You will also be able to use it inside another component too, as a nested component! How cool is that? 😎 As always, the inspiration came from our users: as front-end developers or as designers, you design pages by building it component by component. We want to apply the same concept to content.

This point of view will create limitless possibilities to conceptualize content. You control the way you manage your content, and you have the full power in terms of flexibility.

Based on top of Components, we will also add a new powerful type of field called the Dynamic zones. In a Content-Type, a Dynamic Zone will be a field where you define a set of usable components.

As a Content Editor, you will be able to choose any components you want to add in your Content-Type on the fly. It means the Content-Type structure will be completely dynamic and adapted according to your needs.

Within a Dynamic Zone, you can add as many components as you need and reorder them. It frees the Content Editor from technical complexity to easily manage advanced blog post structures, or update a mobile app view or website page just by reordering the components.

Static Content-Types

Then, the last missing part of our data structure is the ability to create non-repeatable Content-Types. In other words, being able to manage static content such as an "About us" page.

The Webhooks and the Media Library will be also part of that release of new features to improve the experience. It will be easier to integrate Strapi with any kind of CI/CD or static website generators like Gatsby or Gridsome. Then, with the Media Library, you'll be able to sort your files and reuse them across multiple entries.

We will share more details about these features in the next Monthly Update. Stay in touch!

Conclusion

There are a lot of new features and enhancements announced in this post. But we really want to make a point of prioritizing stability and resolution of current pain points. I think we found our balance between bug fixes, improvements and new features in the last months.

The roadmap available on Productboard is up-to-date. If you have any questions, please leave a comment below, I would love to answer you!

See you soon 👋