February 2021 Summaries

The article, written by Precious Luke, explores the Draft and Publish feature introduced in version 3.2 of Strapi, a headless CMS, by demonstrating its use through a mini-blog project utilizing REST and GraphQL APIs. Installed on Heroku with MongoDB Atlas, Strapi allows content to remain in draft form until published, a feature that can be disabled if unnecessary. The piece details the process of setting up Strapi, creating collection types, and manipulating the feature, highlighting how content in draft form gets deleted if the feature is turned off. Additionally, it discusses the creation of REST and GraphQL endpoints and how they can be used to fetch published content. The article concludes with a practical example of building a frontend to display published articles, emphasizing the functionality and flexibility of the Draft and Publish system in content management.

The tutorial provides a comprehensive guide on creating a plugin for a guided tour in Strapi's admin panel using the reactour library, which is beneficial for content managers needing to navigate Strapi's interface. It demonstrates step-by-step processes, starting from setting up a new Strapi project and generating a plugin, to implementing the guided tour within the admin panel of an official demo called Foodadvisor. The guide explains how to structure the tour by associating steps with specific plugins, ensuring that users can start the tour from relevant sections within the admin interface. It highlights the use of JavaScript objects to organize tour steps and the use of React components to manage the tour's state and navigation logic, emphasizing the ability to tailor the tour based on the user's current location within the admin panel. The tutorial also includes instructions for setting up the necessary development environment, including building and deploying the updated admin panel, and offers support through the Strapi community forum for further assistance.

Strapi 3.5 has been released, featuring a Sentry plugin and Single-Sign-On (SSO) authentication for the admin panel, which enhances app monitoring and enterprise-level security, respectively. The Sentry plugin integrates error logging and contextual analysis, while the SSO feature allows users to log in using third-party credentials, available in the Gold Enterprise Edition. The update includes community-contributed improvements, bug fixes, and the ability to set custom logic for authentication events. A new changelog on the Strapi website helps users explore updates, while a template library and demo offer insights into Strapi's capabilities. Community engagement and contributions remain central to Strapi's development, with over 600 members actively involved in enhancing the platform.

The Strapi community has requested a plugin that expands Strapi's core capabilities and allows users to connect their favorite tools to their CMS. To address this request, Strapi is launching an open marketplace for quality plugins, which will showcase the ecosystem of plugins built by partners and the community. The first plugin released is Sentry, a solution that logs errors and provides context for identifying issues in applications. Using the Sentry plugin is straightforward, requiring only adding it to the app's config and linking it to the Sentry project. The plugin's source code is available on GitHub, allowing users to adapt or extend it as needed.

Strapi is an open-source headless content management system for Node.js-based applications, allowing developers to create customizable APIs that can be integrated into their application quickly. It's suitable for modern web development architecture 'Jamstack' and offers various modeling types such as Content Type Modelling, which deals with the structure of content in a database, and Component Modelling, where data structures are used across multiple API models. Strapi provides lifecycle hooks to manage custom ORM queries, one-way, one-to-one, many-to-many, and polymorphic relationships among content types, and allows for attribute validations using native SQL constraints or MongoDB's JSON validation. It also offers model options in the JavaScript file and can be used everywhere in the project without being limited to a subfolder, making it a popular choice over Component Model System. Understanding lifecycle parameters and how they work is beneficial when implementing Content Type Modelling.

In the latest update to Foodadvisor, several new features and improvements have been added, including the implementation of a new collection type called Universals, which allows content managers to create pages directly from the admin panel. This functionality is essential for any headless CMS, enabling quick page deployment when paired with platforms like Nuxt.js, Gatsby, or Next.js on Vercel. The update also upgrades Strapi to its latest version and introduces a guided tour plugin using reactour, designed to help new users navigate the admin interface and set up content types. Users can experience these features through a live demo, which sends an email link to a Strapi instance and a codesandbox link for the front-end, requiring an environment variable adjustment to connect. Feedback is encouraged to improve future updates.