July 2017 Summaries

We are introducing a new feature within Teams, Audit Log, which provides transparency into the different actions taken by team members on various team and site settings. The Audit Log feature will be available for Business customers and above and tracks around 30 different actions that can be performed on teams and sites, with more to be added as needed. It offers a fully searchable overview of nearly every action taken by team members, allowing users to easily monitor and understand changes made to their teams and sites.

Net Neutrality Panel — JAMstack SF` A panel on Net Neutrality was held by JAMstack SF on July 18th, 2017, featuring a diverse group of experts including Chris Riley from Mozilla, Jessica Ashooh from Reddit, Toni Lane Casserly from SingularityU, Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi from AT&T, and Mark Farrell from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The panel was moderated by Dominic Fracassa and covered various aspects of Net Neutrality, including its importance in maintaining an open and accessible internet, the impact of regulatory changes on online services, and the role of blockchain technology in promoting a more equitable internet. The discussion also touched upon the need for greater transparency and accountability in internet governance.

Netlify now offers free form handling, allowing sites to process form submissions without server-side code. To integrate this feature, add a `netlify` attribute to the HTML form tag and a hidden `form-name` field in the JSX form. For static site generators like Gatsby or React-Static, the build tool will generate the static HTML form automatically, requiring only the addition of the `data-netlify` attribute and a hidden `form-name` field. A stateful React form requires additional code to handle the POST request, including encoding the form data and sending it to the site's root path with the correct headers.

Netlify is proud to announce its sponsorship of Let's Encrypt, a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority that has issued over 100 million free SSL certificates since its inception. The partnership allows Netlify to support the creation of a more secure and private web for all users, aligning with its mission to make the web win. By contributing to Let's Encrypt, Netlify aims to ensure that anyone can publish and run sites or apps with the same performance and security as large corporations, promoting an open democratic web built on shared standards. The sponsorship is part of Netlify's efforts to build a performant web that's not tied to any single player, and it reflects the company's strong belief in the importance of an open and secure web for all users.

The US celebrates its independence from colonial rule on July 4, while many other countries also mark significant independence days in July. The power of the web is a key principle of net neutrality, which ensures equal treatment for all data by companies and governments providing internet access. This principle is under threat due to recent efforts to reverse net neutrality provisions in the US. A global effort, known as Battle for the Net, has been launched to defend this principle, with many organizations and individuals rallying behind it. The movement aims to generate a large number of comments before the public comment period closes on July 17. To support this effort, Netlify is enabling an alert on its site and other platforms, allowing users to add the alert to their own sites with ease.

Stefan Judis and Rouven Wessling discuss Contentful, an API-first CMS that decouples content from presentation, offering better cross-platform support and flexibility in choosing a writing language. With Contentful, the CMS backend handles data storage, versioning, and backups, while developers focus on building their site's frontend. This approach enables dynamic product management in static e-commerce workflows, as described by Brian Douglas, founder of OpenSauced.

The Netlify CMS project aims to keep its documentation site updated by utilizing an open-source library called Markdown Magic, which enables the automatic generation of documentation content from a central repository. To further automate this process, Brian Douglas, the founder of OpenSauced, leveraged AWS Lambda and GitHub webhooks to create a seamless synchronization mechanism between the CMS repository and its documentation site. This setup allows contributors to commit updates without any manual intervention, ensuring that the documentation remains up-to-date and easily accessible.