September 2017 Summaries

The Netlify CMS planning session recently held a bi-weekly meeting to discuss their progress towards the Road to 1.0 goal, which includes addressing 47 outstanding issues. To better organize efforts and engage with the community, they have decided to break down their December goal into two week sprints. The next sprint's focus areas include development, documentation, design, and community engagement initiatives such as user testing and crowdsourcing ideas for blogs, tutorials, templates, and improved documentation. The project acknowledges the contributions of its contributors and encourages others to participate in the planning session, Gitter channel, or Twitter discussions.

The Netlify team experienced partial outages in their build network during September, causing degraded service on three separate days. The proximate cause of these incidents varied, but two root causes were shared: a change to the background processing system and an issue with the message queueing system. These issues were exacerbated by traffic from spam users, which caused further degradation. After the last incident, Netlify deployed a permanent fix for the background processing system stalling and has improved the reliability of their message queueing system. They have also implemented safeguards to prevent abuse by spammers and are working on improving their build system and customer communication. The team is prioritizing service stability and customer experience in their future improvements.

Serverless application architectures are gaining popularity due to their ability to build and iterate on products faster with less infrastructure maintenance. This tutorial demonstrates how to create a serverless, SEO-friendly CMS-powered blog using React, ButterCMS, and Netlify. By leveraging the proprietary API-based CMS and content API of ButterCMS, developers can manage content efficiently and integrate it into their frontend applications. The tutorial covers setting up the project, creating routes, building the blog, adding head elements, prerendering, deploying to Netlify, and addressing potential issues such as 404 errors. With this approach, developers can focus on software development without worrying about server maintenance, outages, or scaling bottlenecks.

Netlify provides a built-in form handling feature that makes it easy to handle form submissions using standard HTML forms, even with basic spam protection. This feature can be integrated into projects built with Jekyll or other tools. With Netlify's form handling, users can easily add notifications for every form submission and integrate the form data with external services like Zapier for more advanced use cases. The integration with Zapier allows users to create customized Slack messages or tie into hundreds of other integrations without writing any code. Overall, using the JAMstack does not imply compromising on features, including forms, and Netlify's form handling makes it easy to build scalable and secure web applications.

Netlify CMS is a Content Management System that allows collaborators to create, edit, review, and publish content without writing code or dealing with version control. It's an open-source React app that acts as a wrapper for the Git workflow, using the GitHub API. The project has grown significantly, reaching 3,000 stars on GitHub and over 45 contributors, and is now preparing for its 1.0 release in early December. The roadmap includes improvements to media UI library, design, documentation, and other features, with bi-weekly planning sessions available for community engagement and contribution opportunities. The project aims to make the workflow clearer and easier for contributors to follow, and encourages users to get involved through pull requests and Gitter discussions.

Netlify is introducing two new additions to its platform: the Identity service, which allows developers to manage and authenticate users without building their own solution, and Git Gateway, a feature that connects content contributors or managers without GitHub accounts to Netlify CMS projects. These features aim to streamline and unify communication between microservices in a project by providing a plug-and-play authentication API and a way to add contributors to site management even if they don't have GitHub accounts. The Identity service can be combined with Role Based Access controls to build large, content-driven sites with private or logged-in areas that don't require any custom backend. With Git Gateway, developers can give their contributors the ability to work in the same Git-centric workflow as the rest of the team, even if they don't have a GitHub account.