StrapiConf 2021 Keynote Recap

There is absolutely no doubt about it. The keynote was one of the highlights of the first ever StrapiConf last week. Over the course of 90 minutes, Strapi’s co-founders and Engineering Lead shared their vision for Strapi, made some exciting product announcements and welcomed on stage exciting guest speakers.

Here is a breakdown of the keynote by speakers along with the timestamps to jump directly to the part of the keynote you're most interested in.

Pierre Burgy (Co-founder and CEO, Strapi)

4:00​ History of Strapi

CEO Pierre Burgy kicked off StrapiConf’s keynote with a message of thanks to everyone - from sponsors to speakers and attendees. Pierre also shared the story of the early days of Strapi and the development of the headless CMS industry.

Apart from these major announcements, Pierre also highlighted the importance of the community and made a special shout out to top contributors, and especially the Community Stars, for their commitment.

“Thank you to the early adopters who always encouraged us to make Strapi better. Your feedback has been extremely valuable. Each of your positive messages has been heard and appreciated.”

10:00​ Strapi vision & purpose

In the conference, Pierre revealed the plan to double down on what makes Strapi so unique: open-source, customization capabilities, and shared his vision for the future of Strapi focused on 3 main axes:

1- Create a CMS with the best Developer Experience

2- Connect Strapi to a large ecosystem of plugins built together with technology partners

3- Collaborate to provide the best editing experience for content managers.

Aurelien Georget (Co-founder and CPO, Strapi)

Aurlien Georget, Strapi CPO, started off his speech by stressing on the values of open source:

“open-source is a spirit, a philosophy. It's about freedom, transparency, free speech and privacy. In these difficult times, we all know how important these values are.”

14:00​ Content Modelling is the new design system

Aurelien then introduced a key concept for any Headless CMS: Content Modelling also known as Atomic Content which is one of Strapi’s hidden features.

In summary, an Atomic Content approach is when we break down a content structure like the homepage of your website into smaller pieces of content that we can be reused anywhere, on another page for example.

18:30​ Live demo - Component Migration across projects

To illustrate this concept, Aurelien did a quick demo of how easy it is to create a component in Strapi, and reuse it in another project which can be super useful for web agencies or freelance developers who are doing multiple projects with Strapi. On that note, check out our partner program to learn more about the benefits of joining forces with us.

25:00​ Content Internationalization

Later on, Aurelien officially announced the internationalization feature stating :

“Our goal is to build a software where everyone can participate, by customizing the administration panel, creating new plugins like we did, enhancing existing functionality, and making the migrations easier between versions.”

As an international community, it was crucial to enable content translation in multiple languages. And it's now possible!

It's 100% open-source under MIT license, free and unlimited. Now it’s possible to create and manage content in different languages for multiple locales. Available in both Community and Enterprise editions, without limitations.

The feature allows you to easily copy your content from another locale. It's perfectly integrated with the existing draft & publish functionality and the current permissions system.

28:30​ A sneak peak at the Strapi v4

Aurelien also introduced Strapi V4, a brand new version of Strapi including a free & open-source design system to build beautiful and consistent plugins.

The v4 isn't available yet, but a beta version is expected to be available this summer. This new version will enable Strapi to develop new very asked features such as content versioning, workflow, custom fields, revision history, import & export data and more way faster than what is possible today.

20:45​ Deep dive into Strapi v4 by Alexandre Bodin (Engineering Lead, Strapi)

On the tech side, Alexandre Bodin, Engineering Lead at Strapi explained how the new V4 will enable developers to build great things with Strapi.

Alexandre stated that to achieve that, 3 essentials components will be improved:

The Core framework to build application & custom business logic

The Admin Panel to build new content management features and finally

The Plugins to share features & tools with the whole community

38:41​ Strapi User Success by Jim Laurie (Co-founder and CUSO, Strapi)

Jim Laurie, co-founder and Chief User Success Officer at Strapi gave a quick overview of the internal organization and the resources provided to help Strapi users be successful at every step of their journey.

Jim elaborated on the four pillars of the User Success team and emphasized the importance of Customer Satisfaction saying:

“It is one of our top priorities at Strapi. We go above and beyond to make sure we truly understand every customer's use case, constraints, and requirements.”

44:00​ Strapi at AECOM by Gareth Tissington (Director, AECOM)

Our first guest speaker, Gareth Tissington from AECOM, was one of Strapi's first customers. He shared how AECOM is migrating from Wordpress to Strapi to gain flexibility and agility in the way they build new modern digital experiences with Strapi using both the REST and GraphQL API.

54:00​ Strapi at MindGym by David Lush (CTO, MindGym)

Our second keynote guest and customer reference was David Lush from MindGym. David explained why they migrated to Strapi and how they are using it in combination with Hasura to provide a consistent federated graph interface.

1:07:00​ Fireside Chat with Pierre Burgy and Guillermo Rauch (Founder and CEO, Vercel)

As the last special guest of this keynote, we welcome back to the stage Strapi CEO, Pierre Burgy for a fireside chat with Vercel co-founder and CEO, Guillermo Rauch on the future of the JAMstack ecosystem.

Recording of each track will be available soon - stay tuned.