Review of 2017

One year ago, we were announcing the State of Strapi and its future. 2017 is almost over, so let's see if we did what was announced.

Retrospective

2017 has been an amazing year. Within 12 months, we went from working in our flats to having our office in an incubator in the heart of Paris. We developed several custom Strapi APIs for customers and since July we proudly get back full-time on the project to release v3@alpha.6, then v3@alpha.7.

The team has also grown up with two new members Cyril and Wadii. It's a pleasure to work with you guys, we can't wait to continue this journey!

v3@alpha

The v1 was highly dependent on our online SaaS called the Studio. However, linking an app with this service was difficult and not so relevant. On top of that, many of you wanted to be able to easily install extensible features in their projects.

This is how v3 was born: a full open-source and extensible solution to easily build APIs.

We did our best, with the help of the community, to develop and release the alpha by the end of the year. We finally published it, with the following plugins:

• Settings Manager: Edit the configuration and adjust the security rules of your Strapi project.

• Content Type Builder: Define the data structure of your API, create relations and generate code according to your needs within a few clicks.

• Content Manager: Auto-generated content interface. Discover, create and edit the data managed by your API.

• Users & Permissions: Authenticate users and secure your API.

And here is the result:

The numbers

We wanted to share a few numbers about Strapi in 2017:

• 2 412 stars (give yours)
• 777 users on Slack (join us)
• 17 contributors (become one of them)
• 28,8K downloads
• 132 498 lines of code
• 2478 commits
• 150 forks

The number of monthly downloads increased by 532% within the last 5 months, and this only the beginning.

The future

2018 is going to be an exciting year for us. The backlog is full of features and ideas. After the release of the latest alpha versions, you gave us a lot of feedback, reported some issues and asked for new plugins.

Our main priority is to resolve bugs and make the core more stable. We already started working on it by fixing a lot of issues during the last few days. We plan to be out of alpha in March and to release the official 3.0.0 stable version in May.

Next features

Here a short-list of the coming features in 2018:

• Users & Permissions 2.0: Providers authentication (Facebook, Twitter, Github, ...), custom email templates and advanced settings.

• Upload: Easily upload files on the server or storage providers (AWS S3, etc.).

• Media Library: Link images and assets to database entries.

• GraphQL: Finally, turn your Strapi API into a powerful GraphQL endpoint.

The next ones will be upvoted by you. Thanks to a future page on the website, you will be able to define the roadmap and the new coming features.

Analytics

Last but not least, we are going to offer a new analytics plugin at the beginning of February. Every company needs to track its API usage and the teams have to follow several metrics: active users, retention, custom events, etc.

We realized that many of them are building a custom dashboard or using third-party solutions which are not perfectly adapted to track an API.

Thanks to its design, Strapi has a perfect knowledge of your database structure and lifecycle events. That's why we think we are the ablest to display the most accurate information about your API usage and user's activities without doing anything on your side.

This plugin introduces the second part of our vision about how easy it should be to build and manage an API from A to Z.

See you in 2018

As you may know, this year has been particularly intense for us. For that reason, the whole team will be off next week so we will be less active on Slack and GitHub, but we'll be more than ever in January.

We wish you all the best.

And you, what would you like for 2018?

The Strapi team