- Last updated: March 11, 2026 (Strapi 5 era)
- 6 min read
Strapi release roundup: everything that changed between January and February 2026
March 11, 2026
Certain product updates don't make headlines but quietly transform the day-to-day experience of using a tool. It's not flashy features, it's fixing many little issues that were negatively impacting Strapi users' satisfaction.
Between January 2026 and February 2026, across releases v5.33 through v5.39, that's the kind of work Strapi shipped. The Strapi team invested more time reviewing community proposals and addressing long-standing requests. The numbers speak for themselves: 49 GitHub pull requests from the community, over 150 issues closed. A release window built together, shaped by what the community flagged, fixed by people inside and outside the core team alike. Here's what changed.
Admin UI & mobile experience
Mobile support in the Strapi admin has been a consistent focus across this release window. The Content Manager's edit view, list view, content history forms, subnav, and main navigation have all received targeted improvements for smaller screens. Together, they add up to an admin who no longer fights you when you're not at a desk.
Content Manager
Your list view remembers you It's one of those things you only notice because you had to redo it so often. Every time you returned to the Content Manager, your column preferences, filters, and sorting were gone, reset to defaults, waiting to be reconfigured again. As of v5.36, those settings persist across sessions. The list view you left is the list view you come back to.
You can now filter by publication status If you work with Draft & Publish enabled, the Content Manager list view now has a status filter built in. Before v5.39, finding all your unpublished drafts or verifying what was live meant scrolling through everything. Now you can filter by Draft, Published (all), Published and modified, or Published and unmodified.
Bulk publishing no longer interrupts itself A frustrating bug in bulk publishing caused the confirmation modal to close mid-operation during API refetches, forcing you to start over, uncertain of what had actually been published. That's fixed in v5.35. The operation now runs to completion without interrupting itself.
Cloning an entry now includes its relations When you cloned a content entry, its relational fields weren't being correctly re-populated in the clone. The result was entries that looked complete but were silently missing their connections. v5.36 fixes the root cause, so relations are fetched and repopulated as expected.
You can now control how relation fields open
v5.38 introduces a relationOpenMode setting that lets developers configure how relation fields behave when clicked — opening in a modal, a full page, or a new tab. Before this, the behavior was fixed and couldn't be adapted to the content structure or team workflow. It's a small configuration option with a meaningful impact on how editors navigate complex content.
Media Library
Your images now stay in frame Before v5.35, when an image was cropped or resized to fit a layout, Strapi had no way of knowing which part of the image mattered. A portrait could lose its subject. A product photo could lose the product. Now we've added a focal-point picker to the Media Library: you click the point that matters, and Strapi uses it as the anchor when your image is adapted to different sizes or formats.
Your existing media library can now be AI-enriched, retroactively (Growth Plan License required) AI-powered metadata generation (automatic alt text and captions) was already available for new uploads. But for teams who had been building up a media library for months or years, the benefit stopped at the door. With v5.34, you can now trigger AI metadata generation on files that are already in your library. If you've been accumulating assets without structured metadata, you no longer have to choose between leaving them untagged or manually going back through hundreds of files.
File type restrictions now actually restrict This one is worth naming plainly: before v5.33.3, upload file type restrictions configured in Strapi could be bypassed through the Content API. That gap is closed. The restriction you set is now enforced consistently, regardless of how the upload request is made.
Media can now be imported directly from a URL The upload system now supports importing assets directly from a URL, no need to download a file locally before uploading it to Strapi. A practical time-saver for content teams working with external media sources.
Developer experience
The email provider has been upgraded The email-nodemailer provider has been upgraded to Nodemailer v8, bringing with it support for advanced email features and new Admin UI capabilities. If you're using Strapi's email provider for transactional emails, this upgrade expands what's configurable and addressable directly from the admin, without dropping into code.
S3-compatible storage is now a first-class option The AWS S3 upload provider has been extended to support the full configuration surface of S3-compatible storage services. In practice, this means you can now connect Strapi to Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2, DigitalOcean Spaces, and other S3-compatible providers using the official provider, without needing custom workarounds or third-party plugins. If you've been running one of these services alongside Strapi, the path just got significantly cleaner.
Project scaffolding now works in fully automated environments
create-strapi-app now supports a --non-interactive flag, allowing you to scaffold a new Strapi project without any prompts. For CI pipelines, infrastructure-as-code setups, and any automated environment where human input isn't an option, this removes the last manual step from project initialization.
Changing a password now ends active sessions Before v5.33.3, updating a user's password in Strapi didn't automatically invalidate their existing sessions. That meant a compromised account couldn't be fully locked out by a password change alone, active tokens remained valid. Session revocation on password change is now implemented.
API parameter handling is more secure by default
v5.37 introduces strictParam, addQueryParams, and addInputParams controls, tightening how query and input parameters are handled at the API layer. This is a defensive improvement, less visible than a feature, but meaningful for teams with security requirements or public-facing APIs.
What's next
This post covers the most significant changes across the latest releases, but dozens of additional bug fixes and smaller improvements shipped alongside everything described here. The release notes have the complete picture, and they're worth a look.
A meaningful share of this work came from the community. Pull requests, bug reports, feature requests that turned into merged code. Strapi is an open-source project, and that means its quality is a collective responsibility. The more people who report issues, propose fixes, and submit pull requests, the better Strapi gets for everyone. We're counting on that to continue. There's always more to fix, more to improve, more to build. And we'll do it, together.
To see the full list of changes, visit the release notes: