Strapi Community Call Recap January 2025

Let's recap what happened during the January 2025 Strapi Community Call.

We're going to cover the following topics:

• Year in Review: Strapi's Achievements
• Strapi SDK and Preview Features: Technical Deep Dive
• Building your first Strapi Plugin: Theo's Experience
• Announcement of Strapi Conf

For those who couldn't make it, no worries! The session was recorded, ensuring everyone had access to the valuable information shared.

But let's do a quick recap of what we covered.

Year in Review: Strapi's Achievements

Kicking off the Year in Review, here at Strapi, we're proud of what we've achieved.

From the release of Strapi 5, to the introduction of Strapi Cloud, to the expansion of our community, we've made significant strides in 2024 and look forward to even more exciting developments in 2025.

We couldn't have done it without the support of our community, and we're grateful for all the contributions and feedback we've received.

We introduced Strapi 5, which introduced a lot of back-end updates that made it possible for new features like Draft and Publish, Content History as well as TypeScript integration and Vite Support.

Strapi Cloud also saw remarkable advancements. From introduction of backups, which guaranteed data safety.

Deployment times became noticeably quicker, cutting down wait times and improving efficiency from 7 minutes to 3 minute when deploying a new Strapi instance.

Additionally, with expanded regions to include EU, Singapore and Australia, Strapi Cloud now catered to a global audience more effectively, ensuring users worldwide could access the services they need.

Security and trust remained a top priority, as evidenced by Strapi's achievements in GDPR and SOC 2 compliance. These certifications underscored Strapi's commitment to organizational trust and data security, vital for users and partners alike.

And recently introduced three new updates to Strapi that will help you collaborate better, scale faster, and stay secure. Here’s what’s new:

• Static Preview — Preview your content before publishing—available for free on all plans.
• Growth Plan — A new plan designed for growing teams, offering advanced collaboration and publishing tools for $15/month per seat.
• SSO Add-On — Add enterprise-grade security to your Growth Plan for $50/month per seat, without needing the full Enterprise commitment.

You can learn more here

The community's engagement and growth.

Strapi welcomed over 200 community contributors, further enriching the ecosystem with fresh ideas and solutions. The year also witnessed the addition of 40 new plugins to the Strapi Marketplace and the establishment of partnerships across six continents.

These milestones, alongside the welcoming of the first enterprise-level partner, setting the stage for even more collaborative innovation.

Strapi SDK and Preview Features: Technical Deep Dive

During the community call, we demoed the Strapi SDK and Strapi Preview features, that are both great additions for developers and content editors.

Srapi SDK

The Strapi SDK simplifies the tasks developers face when managing collections and performing CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.

With straightforward methods for accessing and manipulating data, the SDK minimizes the complexity typically associated with backend interactions.

Developers can quickly integrate Strapi into their projects without getting bogged down by intricate coding requirements, thereby focusing more on building innovative solutions.

Checkout it out on GitHub to learn more.

We released our v1 version and would love your feedback, you can let us know here.

Strapi Preview

Meanwhile, the Strapi Preview feature offers content creators a powerful way to preview their changes in draft mode before hitting publish. This functionality enhances the editorial workflow, ensuring that content is thoroughly reviewed and polished before it goes live. The ability to toggle between draft and published versions provides a safety net for content managers, allowing them to experiment and make adjustments without the risk of prematurely displaying incomplete or incorrect information.

The preview feature shines in its seamless integration with Next.js making with it's easy setup.

You can read more about it here.

But the basic steps are: 1. Enable the preview feature in your Strapi instance. 2. Create a preview handler in Strapi 3. Create a preview handler route that handles requests to the appropriate draft or published content, utilizing Next.js' draft mode to manage state effectively.

You can find example code here for the demo that I used in the video.

Building your first Strapi Plugin with Theo

Checkout his awesome blog post on how to build your first Strapi plugin here.

Theo had a problem where he wanted to share his content across multiple platforms like Medium and Dev.to but he didn't want to manually post his content to each platform.

So he created a Strapi plugin to automate the process of sharing his content across multiple platforms.

I love that Strapi makes it easy for developers to build plugins that help to solve real-world problems.

I think it is one of the best Strapi features.

We would love to encourage you to build a cool plugin and share it with the community.

Announcement of Strapi Conf Paris 2025

Exciting news for the Strapi community—Strapi Conf is coming to Paris! This live event offers developers and tech enthusiasts a unique opportunity to connect, learn, and share insights.

Paris, renowned for its vibrant tech scene, provides the perfect backdrop for this interactive conference.

Attendees can expect awesome talks and workshops. Meet and greet with the Strapi team and other Strapi community members.

If you have a cool talk idea, you can submit it here.

We still have slots available for lightning talks.

Learn more here

Content and Community Highlights

Before we wrap up, I want to highlight some of the content and community highlights from the Strapi community.

To new plugins that you may like, have been updated to Strapi 5.

Protect Populate

An easy way to protect your GET populates from miss use. By protecting the endpoint from getting more data then you intended.

Learn more here

Redirects

This plugin allows a user to manage redirects from the admin panel.

Learn more here

Also, here are two more articles about how to choose a hosting provider for your Strapi instance and a case study on how the Library was able to improve its content workflow by applying best practices around content management.

Strapi Cloud or self-hosting? 8 key factors—like setup, scalability, and cost—to help you choose the best hosting solution for your project.

When deciding to use Strapi for your project, one key consideration is how you’ll host it. This guide explores the two main hosting options available: Strapi Cloud, a fully-managed hosting solution, and self-hosting, where your team manages the infrastructure.

Refactoring Strapi to Empower Content Editors - LibraryOn Case Study

The LibraryOn project aims to be the digital front door for the UK’s library system, connecting users to 3,601 libraries across 209 authorities. For a project of this scale, managing content efficiently is crucial, and that’s where Strapi—a flexible, composable headless CMS—comes in.

Strapi’s dynamic capabilities offer immense potential to streamline content management, empower editors, and ensure a seamless publishing workflow. However, flexibility alone doesn’t guarantee success. As with any technology or infrastructure choice, the true potential of a platform is unlocked only through correct implementation—in this case, the most effective work simplified the content structure, empowered content creators, and provided a scalable foundation for growth.

Read More

Thank you for reading. Hope to see you at Strapi Conf.

All the best,

Paul

p.s: Join us at Strap's open office hours on Discord.

Strapi Open Office Hours

If you have any questions about Strapi 5 or just would like to stop by and say hi, you can join us at Strapi's Discord Open Office Hours Monday through Friday at 12:30 pm - 1:30 pm CST: Strapi Discord Open Office Hours

Stop by with questions or just to say hi.