Strapi Summer Update

Summer (in Europe) just started a month ago, even if we would like to enjoy the lovely weather, the core team and contributors worked hard to provide a bunch of updates and enhancements. From the Enterprise Edition to the new Role-Based Access Control feature, the Strapi ecosystem is booming! Let's see this in details below 👇

Unfortunately, there has been no online meetup scheduled in July, but don't worry, we will back soon with new formats and even more meetups! Nevertheless, last month, Jeff Meyerson interviewed Pierre (Strapi's CEO) about our product, what is our mission, and the new Headless CMS trend in Software Engineering Daily.

Company

We are thrilled to welcome Victor as Customer Success Manager, Rémi as Software Engineer, Daniel as Developer Advocate, Samuel as Product Manager (community-oriented), Mégane as Technical Writer and Anastasiia as Product Marketing Manager! Victor will help our customers get the most out of Strapi to ensure they successfully reach their business goals, while Rémi will develop new starters to help our users to set up new projects in no time. Talking about starters, Daniel will promote them and the whole product to everyone by participating and attending a lot of conferences and meetups. Feel free to say "Hello 👋", you won't regret it, he's awesome! And last but not least, Samuel will help you as a community member to contribute more and more to the project by improving the collaboration between the core team and contributors, Megane will make the documentation as easy to read as 1,2,3 and Anastasiia will tell you all about what’s coming next and the latest Strapi features.

Oh, I almost forgot him because he was already considered as part of the team, our one and only Derrick, one of the most active contributors, joined the project as a Solution Engineer last July. He will continue to help everyone find solutions to their issues! We wrote a dedicated post, check it out!

We are still looking for new awesome people to join the team. If you want to be part of the journey, send us your application!

Product

Every year, we try to define two milestones at the beginning of the year. This year, one of these was the development of the Role-Based Access Control feature. As a CMS providing an administration panel, it is mandatory to be able to define the permissions to access specific features. We already received a lot of feedback from the community, they are really good and we couldn't expect a better way to start the summer!

This new release was also an excellent opportunity to officially start (in ßeta) the first part of our business model. Following the common open-core model, we are now offering an Enterprise Edition of Strapi. In this edition, you've unlimited access to Role-Based Access Control. It also offers exclusive advantages such as customer support and training.

If you want to know more about the Enterprise Edition and the pricing, please read the official press release.

Even if summer often rhymes with holidays on the beach, our core developer team is happy to work on developing new features just for you!! Here’s the roadmap:

• Draft & Publish
• Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
• Plugin API

• Database Layer

Draft & Publish

As an open-source company and headless CMS, our obsession has always been to provide the best developer experience possible. However, once the project is set up, developers hand the projects to the final end-users: the Content Editors. Their goal is to write the best and creative content possible. In order to do that, they need time to think, test, and iterate their ideas.

That's why introducing a real draft system was absolutely necessary. Being able to write content, step away, and come back to continue writing is impossible without a drafting feature. The Draft & Publish system will also include another principle: collaboration. We don't want to let a user override the content written by another user, even more, when a second user is editing it at the same time. In order to do that, the feature will provide a "Take over" functionality to alert users when another user is already editing an entry. If they want to, they’ll be able to take over the entry to edit it.

We plan to release the feature at the end of the quarter, in September.

Contributor License Agreement

When we contribute to the project, like any contributor, we have to sign every commit to ensure the DCO robot will accept the PR. Even if the DCO is the lightest way to ensure every commit's author has the right to submit its changes and let everyone use them, the overall process can be painful.

To fix that, we decided to ask every contributor to sign a CLA once for all to make the contribution workflow easier. The CLA document will be very close to the DCO one. We plan to use the CLA assistant open-source library developed by SAP. In other words, it means that as a new contributor you'll have to sign the CLA, otherwise your pull request won't be merged. Then, for the next contributions, you won't have to repeat the process as a CLA isn't associated with the code itself but to a person.

Plugin API

Regarding what's coming next in the roadmap, especially the Internationalization feature, we had to invest time in the internal APIs. As we plan to provide this feature as a plugin, we need to continue the development of the Plugin API.

More specifically, the Plugin API should provide an abstraction layer to do the following actions:

• Inject dependencies
• Add new command in the CLI

• Add new controllers, models, and services

In the next few months, we will open an RFC to share the details of the Plugin API implementation.

Database Layer

If you are familiar with Strapi, or if you take a look at our public roadmap or issues, you know that our current filter system can be optimized. Thus, we also have performance issues in our GraphQL plugin. By harmonizing the way we deal with data and how we filter it, we want to increase the productivity of the core team but also of everyone writing custom code in their Strapi projects.

Like the Plugin API, we will come back to you with further details soon.

Conclusion

I hope this post has given you more visibility of what we have been doing this summer. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment below. We look forward to answering you!

See you soon 👋