Strapi Online Meetup #1 Recap

Last week, the Strapi team hosted its first-ever Online Meetup and it was an absolute blast to connect with the Strapi community. We were not only amazed by the number and diversity of the attendee pool but also by the energy and the number of questions received.

Shout out to @ScottAgirs who started a thread on GitHub to identify topics/pain points to be discussed in future webinars.

Follow this link to share your ideas.

Here is a quick recap of this webinar along with the slides, video recording, and the top 5 questions from the audience.

By the numbers:

• 142 registrants 👥
• 70 attendees 🔊
• 175 messages 💬
• 22 questions ❓
• 5 continents 🌍

In this online meetup, Aurélien Georget, co-founder and Chief Product Officer first gave everyone some context by looking at the CMS history, from the first web browser to the rise of traditional CMS such as Wordpress, Drupal, etc. He then introduced the JAMstack promise and the differences between decoupled and Headless CMS as well as databases-driven CMS vs Git-based ones. We looked at the main Strapi features introduced in the latest versions and got to see a live demo of the new Dynamic Zones feature which allows users to build dynamic pages and complex data structures from multiple components and nested fields.

Finally, we looked at the Strapi roadmap and shared some insights into what to expect in upcoming releases.

What does the timeline look like on a plugin marketplace (For Strapi and User plugins)?

The plugin marketplace is something that’s definitely ranking high on our priority list. However, we first need to ship a number of must-have features including Single Types, UID field, and the Media Library which will be part of our stable release. We’re also prioritizing the development of the Admin and Permissions feature as the foundation for the beta of Strapi Enterprise edition.

Any plans for database introspection for migrating from other frameworks/CMS/ORMs?

We don’t have a very specific plan for this yet. However, we will make sure to provide a way for users to import or export data from Strapi. From there it should be quite easy to create importers for WordPress, Joomla or any other CMS.

Are there any plans to change from the OAuth libraries Grant & Purest to Passport or something else that has more support for other OAuth vendors?

Yes, we know that the Grant & Purest libraries are super heavy and that users might be experiencing issues with them so we definitely want to do something about it. However, this is not one of our priorities at the moment as we’re focusing on other important features. It would be awesome to receive contributions from the community on that topic specifically. That being said, that plugin won't be installed by default as soon as the API access token feature will be released which should help users overcome this issue.

Is there anything else, other than contributing to the project on GitHub, we as a community can do to help support Strapi?

Yes absolutely. In addition to spreading the words and inviting others to join the conversation on Twitter, Stack Overflow, Spectrum, etc, we are always looking for people who are willing to help with the documentation, contributing tutorials and blog posts as well as organizing Strapi meetups (contact hi@strapi.io for more info).

It would be super powerful if the Strapi - Gatsby plugin could support dynamic zones better, by exposing the different components as GraphQL fragments through the Gatsby GraphQL engine. Is this on the roadmap?

Yes, improving the Gatsby-source-Strapi plugin is definitely something that important to us. Stay tuned for more information on this topic very soon :) For the moment, we actually advise users to leverage the Gatsby source graphQL plugin and connect it to the GraphQL endpoint provided by Strapi.