Strapi Q2 Community Update: Achievements and What's Next

Dear Strapi Community, 2023 started with a bang 💥 Let’s celebrate the Q1 achievements and look at what’s next!

Q1 Review

Product

With 4 minor releases, which include highly expected features, and an entirely new product (Strapi Cloud), we can proudly say that we, as a community, shipped faster than ever:

• Strapi 4.6: Data Export & Import, Relations and Component Reordering, and Audit Logs 👌
• Strapi 4.7: Data Transfer and Audit Logs improvements ⚡️
• Strapi 4.8: Custom Roles & Permissions Available for Free 🙌🏾
• Strapi 4.9: Transfer Pull Data and Private S3 buckets 🔐
• Strapi Cloud: Strapi, easier than ever ☁️

Data Export & Import, and Transfer

Migrating content across environments was complex, requiring custom scripts or data imports and exports. The new Data Export, Import, and Transfer feature makes it seamless.

Audit Logs

Audit Logs now completes the Enterprise Edition offering, making Strapi even more relevant for large teams collaborating intensively in the CMS. You can now embrace compliance by getting a record of actions performed within your Strapi application, including data changes, user activity, and system configurations.

Private S3 Buckets

From now on, you can use Strapi with Private S3 buckets, so you are able to secure your digital assets while making them available to your website or app users.

Strapi Cloud

Even more exciting: we officially released Strapi Cloud! Although having the ability to self-host your favorite CMS is great, it also comes with responsibility. You now have the best of both worlds: you can either host Strapi on your own servers or simply use Strapi Cloud. Big shoutout and thanks to everyone who shared great feedback and insights as part of the beta program. Please see below what we will improve in Q2. If you did not sign up yet, give it a try: https://cloud.strapi.io!

Special shout out to all the contributors who created at least one pull request that has been merged this quarter: Priyanshu-Singh-veer, RodrigoWebDev, iamandrewluca, nikita-fuchs, borusbillion, edlefebvre, gitstart, fdel-car, smorimoto, Cpaczek!

Community

The Strapi Community was on fire in Q1:

• Strapi has been downloaded more than 800k in Q1 alone, +18% compared to Q4.
• 397 issues have been closed in Q1, 22.5% more than in Q4. This strongly reinforces the robustness of Strapi.
• We re-introduced the Strapi Community Org.
• We announced StrapiConf 2023, save the date!
• We organized amazing webinars with Strapi Partners:
• Enabling custom Content Editing Experiences with CKEditor and Strapi
• Developers boost marketing’s productivity with Strapi and Stackbit
• Breaking the WordPress monolith with Strapi, Next.js and Vercel
• Simen Daehlin, one of Strapi Community Star as a Solution Engineer, joined the team.

Content writers published 14 articles through the Write for the Community Program:

• How To Add Unit Tests To Your Strapi Plugin](https://strapi.io/blog/how-to-add-unit-tests-to-your-strapi-plugin)
• How to Create a Book Rating App with Strapi Ratings Plugin and Cloudinary
• How to Quickly Get Started with Strapi Using Azure ARM Templates
• A Quick Introduction to Micro Frontend using Module Federation
• How to Deploy and Scale Strapi on a Kubernetes Cluster ½
• How to Integrate iPay Africa APIs into your Strapi Application
• On-Premise Vs Cloud Solutions: Which Is The Best For Your Business?
• How to Build a Pseudo Multi-Tenant Application in Strapi?
• How To Create Automated Tests For Strapi API using PactumJS
• Implementing A/B Testing With Strapi, React, and Optimizely
• How to Add a Custom OAuth2/OpenID Connect Provider to Strapi v4
• How to Create a Task Time Tracker Chrome Extension With Strapi and ReactJs
• How to Optimize Performance of Strapi-Powered Websites and Applications: Techniques and Best Practices

Team

The team is now 77 Strapiers. We work 100% remotely, with 0 offices, in 15 countries, 20 nationalities, 5 values, and 1 mission: Empower the community to share and manage any content, anywhere. We are here for you all, every single day. To highlight our all-remote culture, we published some insightful posts:

• How to Best Spend Your Time With Remote Work, by Trecia.
• The Best of Remote Work: 5 Months Working From Portugal, by Noémie.

Also, we are delighted some new Strapiers joined the team:

• Emna - DevOps Engineer/SRE
• Florent - DevOps Engineer/SRE
• Khanh - Backend Engineer
• Lucas - Product Designer
• Lucie - QA Engineer
• Simen - Solutions Engineer

Welcome to all of you!

What’s Next in Q2?

As mentioned in the Goodbye 2022, Hello 2023 article, our priorities this year are Cloud and Content:

• Cloud: Using open-source is great as you can host it on any cloud, but it comes with the need of configuring and managing the infrastructure. With Strapi Cloud, using Strapi is now easier than ever. Thanks to your precious feedback, we will keep improving Strapi Cloud (please see more details below).
• Content: Headless CMSs are great, but content editors deserve a better experience. We’ve been working on the Developer Experience for many years and will keep doing it. In parallel, we will also offer a unique Editing Experience with strong collaboration capabilities for the end users. We will do this by reconciling the front-end with the CMS, making Strapi the Headless CMS both Developers and Content Editors love.

Product

Q2 will be another great quarter, with a many of improvements being prepared and eventually released throughout the next three months:

CMS improvements

TypeScript Improvements One of the major improvements will be the introduction of typed factories. This feature will enable developers to easily create or extend new or existing application endpoints. With typed factories, developers can build routes, controllers, and services with strong type definitions that match their application's specific requirements.

We’ll also introduce strongly typed core services to simplify the process of building complex queries to manage data within your application. This includes the entity service types, which will provide developers with a clean and robust way to interact with their data using strongly typed parameters and return values.

Another improvement we're making is better automatic type generation. With this feature, developers can quickly generate and update their type definitions based on their application's code and structure. This will help ensure their types remain accurate and updated as their code evolves. By automating this process, developers can focus on building features and functionality rather than worrying about keeping their type definitions up to date.

We are also improving our tooling to ensure that developers’ generated types are always up to date with their application logic. This includes improved build processes automatically generating and updating type definitions upon changes or a server restart. By improving our tooling, we're making it easier for developers to work with TypeScript and Strapi.

Rich Text Editor The default Rich Text Editor is based on Markdown, which is often too complex for content editors. We will replace it with an editor offering a much better editing experience. In the meantime, feel free to use one of the existing custom fields plugins, such as CKEditor.

Review Workflows This feature, in great progress already, will allow the content editors team to define and use workflows, ensuring the content is reviewed before publication. This is especially useful when translating content and working as a team on content creation. Please note this feature will be part of the Enterprise Edition only.

Strapi Cloud improvements

Domain names You will be able to use a custom domain name (ex.mycompany.strapiapp.com).

Regions You will soon be able to deploy your Strapi projects in Europe (and later in additional regions).

Project Sharing With this specific improvement, it will be possible for you to invite your colleagues to work on the same Strapi Cloud project, which will be a first step to the organizational accounts (that should be live in Q3).

Documentation

Adding More Examples We heard you and will add more real-world examples in the documentation this quarter. After the brand new homepage and a few other surprises will come too.

Back-end Customization Many of you like to use Strapi for its customization capabilities. As a result, the Back-end customization section is one of the most visited. We will focus our efforts on improving it and increasing your satisfaction.

Community

StrapiConf 2023 will be on June 7th. Make sure you register now: https://strapi.io/strapiconf2023 or contact us at conf@strapi.io if you’re interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities. Looking forward to meeting (virtually) there!

Team

Mid-June, the Strapi team will meet in person for the annual offsite, which will be in France this year. Stay tuned for pictures!

We’re hiring for several positions this quarter. Feel free to apply.

Let’s make it happen!

No need to say Q2 is going to be another great quarter for Strapi. Join us on Discord to contribute and stay posted!