March 2020 Summaries

Derrick Mehaffy, a DevOps expert and long-time Strapi contributor, along with Jim Laurie, Strapi's co-founder and CTO, recently delivered an insightful talk focused on Strapi deployment options. They discussed a variety of topics including headless CMS deployment considerations, best practices for migrating between environments, and the use of DigitalOcean's one-click deploy buttons. The event, attended by 70 participants from five continents, generated significant engagement with 134 messages and 17 questions. Victor Coisne, Strapi's VP of Marketing and an advocate for the open-source community, has a rich background in Open Core B2B companies and enjoys various leisure activities in his free time.

Maxime, who leads the "Write for the community" program at Strapi, outlines an initiative to create a centralized hub for Strapi-related tutorials and articles, hosted on a GitHub repository renamed to strapi/community-content. This repository encourages contributions from the Strapi community by allowing members to list, request, create, and translate tutorials, which are then featured on the Strapi website. The goal is to expand the repository to include Strapi/JAMstack/open-source articles and projects, making it a comprehensive resource for developers. Contributors are invited to submit content via GitHub issue templates and are promised visibility and possible compensation. Maxime emphasizes the importance of educational, non-promotional content and invites both experienced and novice writers to share their experiences with Strapi in a dedicated Slack channel, fostering community engagement and resource sharing.

Strapi, an open-source Headless CMS, has been actively expanding its team and enhancing its features to improve user experience and meet community needs. Recent updates include the introduction of the Single Type feature for managing static content, a new UID field for generating unique identifiers, and ongoing development of a Media Library for asset management. Additionally, Strapi is working on an API token feature to enhance security and plans to implement a flexible Users, Roles, and Permissions system using Policy-Based Access Control. The company is committed to maintaining development momentum and prioritizes user satisfaction by responding to feedback and continuously improving its product offerings.

The text discusses Strapi's initiative to provide pre-built starters for creating blog applications using various frontend frameworks, such as React, Gatsby, Vue, Next.js, Nuxt, and Angular, which are based on previously released tutorials. These starters are intended to help users quickly set up and visualize the integration of Strapi with their chosen frontend framework, making it easier to understand the product without starting from scratch. The text highlights the availability of these starters, with specific instructions for setting up the Angular Starter, and encourages community engagement through sharing feedback and participating in forums. Additionally, the text mentions Maxime, a member of the Strapi Growth team, who contributes useful content for the community.

A new repository called "awesome-strapi" has been launched within the Strapi GitHub organization to compile and showcase valuable resources related to the Strapi technology and service. This repository, inspired by the numerous Strapi plugins and providers available on NPM, was organized by Derrick Mehaffy, who established its structure and initial content. As a public repository, it invites contributions from the community through pull requests, allowing users to share links to useful and interesting Strapi resources, including new plugins and providers. The initiative aims to enhance the Strapi ecosystem by encouraging community participation, and Maxime, a member of the Strapi Growth team since 2015, is actively involved in creating content for the community.

Strapi, an open-source content management system, has garnered a supportive community, including notable contributors like Pouya Miralayi, who has actively improved the platform by merging pull requests and developing plugins. Pouya's journey with Strapi began in 2019 when he needed a comprehensive solution for building an admin dashboard, and he was impressed by Strapi's capabilities, which exceeded his expectations and facilitated the growth of his project into a robust application. He has since contributed to the Strapi ecosystem by creating plugins that enhance functionality, such as importing content and integrating with the web page builder Grapesjs. His enthusiasm reflects a broader community appreciation for Strapi's flexibility and utility, making it a preferred choice for many developers seeking a reliable backend solution. As Strapi continues to evolve, the community plays a crucial role in its development, with contributors like Pouya paving the way for innovative features and integrations.

The Strapi project is being supported in a time of need for the community due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has forced many in-person events to be cancelled. In response, Strapi is hosting online meetups and creating local meetup groups for when gatherings can resume. The first three monthly meetups have been hosted with guest speakers sharing their expertise on various topics related to Strapi deployment options. The community is encouraged to participate by creating issues on the GitHub repository or sending an email to `[email protected]`. Strapi aims to provide resources and assistance to help bring the community together through organizing meetups, offering support for local meetup groups, and promoting networking opportunities among community leaders.

Strapi has been added to the DigitalOcean Marketplace, allowing users to deploy new Strapi instances with a one-click option, significantly reducing setup time to under two minutes. This development aligns with Strapi's mission to simplify content management for developers and end-users, as highlighted by CEO Pierre Burgy. Strapi supports various JAMstack static site generators and both SQL and NoSQL databases, with deployment capabilities across multiple platforms such as AWS, Netlify, and Heroku. The availability of a one-click deployment option on both platform.sh and DigitalOcean enhances Strapi's accessibility for developers. Chris Sevilleja from DigitalOcean emphasized Strapi's compatibility with REST and GraphQL APIs, making it a robust backend solution for JavaScript static site generators. Upcoming webinars, hosted by industry experts, will explore JAMstack best practices, focusing on API layers and deployment strategies, with additional insights on Strapi's deployment options provided by Derrick Mehaffy and Jim Laurie.

This Nuxt starter for creating a blog with Strapi allows users to try Strapi with Nuxt and is fully customizable, open to contributions, and includes a simple example of a blog. The starter can be easily created using the create-strapi-starter CLI or by copying and pasting a command line in the terminal. It sets up a monororepo with separate frontend and backend folders for the Nuxt and Strapi applications, installing all dependencies and launching development servers automatically.

Strapi beta.19 introduces the Single Types feature, a highly requested addition that facilitates management of unique, non-repetitive content such as menus, static pages, and footers. Single Types allow users to create and manage content that will only have one instance, unlike Collection Types which are used for content that is repeated. The feature is particularly useful for global settings and SEO, incorporating a UID field to ensure unique, SEO-friendly URLs. Users can easily create Single Types through the Content-Type Builder and modify the content author experience by configuring the view and order of fields. Single Types can have one-to-one or one-to-many relations with Collection Types, and they can be converted to Collection Types and vice versa, provided relational compatibility is maintained. The update also includes contributions from community members, and Strapi encourages ongoing user engagement and contributions to its open-source platform.

With the release of Strapi's hosted trial and now the Platform.sh One-click deploy button, users can easily create and deploy new Strapi instances on-demand in various regions and cloud providers, taking only 3 minutes to set up a fully functional instance. This feature enables organizations to build, evolve, and scale their website fleet without any infrastructure management investment, while also providing a seamless deployment process with minimal clicks required. The addition of more deploy buttons is planned over the next few weeks, allowing users to choose from different cloud providers and deployment platforms.