The DatoCMS Blog

Retrospective for winter 20-21 and plans for the near future

Posted on March 9th, 2021 by Matteo Giaccone

It's been a while since our last retrospective as we've been quite busy working on a set of new features. Let's quickly go over what happened in the last six months or so.

Structured text

The main focus of the last few months has been the release of the new structured text field. We've been thinking for a long while about this as we knew that the experience writing long form content wasn't good enough for us. So we've been working a lot on adding the field and all the necessary tooling around it to make it as easy as possible to integrate in your workflow and also providing a migration path from modular content.

If you haven't already, have a look at the blog post introducing the new field.

Responsive CMS UI

Another major improvement that we've released was around getting the CMS UI to work on smaller devices. We are very happy to have launched a responsive version, at least of the editorial side of the CMS. So now you can fix that annoying typo on the go, sounds good to me!

ore details on the blog post.

Real-time updates API

Difficult to believe, yes, but we've also released this new API to go with the current GraphQL API. You can get a streaming channel which updates as soon as content is updated. A nifty way to get a preview of the content while still using the exact same GraphQL query that you were used to. Very easy transition from existing systems and something that will please all the editors.

Together with the new API we've also released a new section of the documentation on it.

Improvements on blocks

After the introduction of the structured text field we felt that the blocks could do with some extra work. As now you can share blocks between structured texts and modular contents we've felt the need of a new section in the settings where you can manage the blocks. There's a whole changelog with videos about it.

With this latest addition we also added some other little improvements to the blocks and hopefully something more will come soon.

Upload permissions

We've filled a void in the permission system by adding the same style of permissions that were available to the records also to the media area. So now you can restrict access to the assets in the same way as you can for the records.

Changelog

I've not mentioned more features that we've shipped. Keep an eye on the Product updates to stay on top of our changes and review every little thing that we've released.

Future plans

After this impressive set of new features you might ask, what's coming up next???

Unfortunately we don't have many features lined up for the next couple months! We have kept the next few months quite empty as we expect to need some extra time on structured text tooling and bug fix. Plus we are focusing on a deep round of maintenance all around our systems. So not much fancyness coming soon.

Also, we have decided to avoid releasing a V4 of our REST API. We were expecting that, but really we managed to ship or plan retro-compatible changes, so we are even happier to avoid such release in the foreseeable future. One that was particularly interesting was the ability of getting block records without additional calls, mentioned in the last changelog.

As always, feel free to discuss any of these topics in our Community. We'll be in touch soon!

Cover photo by Alexandra K on Unsplash