Hi friends, this month we went a little long with our monthly update, but let's make up for it!
A big chunk of our attention on January has been devoted to a major infrastructure change that will happen by the end of the month, namely horizontal partitioning of projects across multiple databases. Fabrizio is doing an outstanding job, and this change will allow us to scale much better, and be able to offer dedicated databases for those of you who need more reliable performance.
Other than that, we've managed to squeeze in a number of small but useful improvements into production... and the partner program is finally out!
Agency Partner Program, at last!
It's been a teaser for several months now, but we're finally here! Our idea of partnership is not one-size-fits-all, because you are too different to be handled the same way. We want to talk to you, get to know you, and offer you exactly what you need. Even though it's been less than a month, 17 agencies are already enrolled, and many more are currently underway.
Get in touch if you're interested, we can't wait to chat with you!
New built-in presentation modes: Radio group, Checkbox Group and Select inputs
By popular demand, we decided to add a couple new ways of presenting booleans, strings and JSON fields to your editors. We could have easily released them as plugins, but we thought they're frequent enough to deserve their permanent place in DatoCMS.
Custom marks and styles in Structured Text
While Structured Text is a consciously simple format that is 100% decoupled from the presentation layer, there are situations where it is critical to be able to add a small, controlled set of styles to your content, to represent nuances of different semantics within a piece of content.
Well, with plugins it is now possible to add custom marks and styles!
New usage reports available on every project
To better help you optimize your frontend, we've worked on two new reports in the "Project usages" section, showing you what assets your traffic is coming from. The reports show the URLs complete with Imgix transformation parameters, so it becomes very easy to see ie. where you haven't added optimization parameters on your end.
Link and date(time) fields can now be set as titles
So far only Single-line Text fields could be set as the title field for a record... well it is now possible to also use Link fields, Date fields and DateTime fields. It's a particularly useful feature when you have ie. "event" records, where a date might be the most important bit to highlight from a record!
Remix fully supported + React components update
Given the booming interest in Remix — which is totally well deserved — we decided to invest some time to better integrate with it. We now offer a step-by-step getting-started guide, and a Starter Project complete with preview mode that you can deploy on Netlify/Vercel.
We also released a new version of our <Image /> component for React, that is both lighter and more powerful, offering multiple layout modes to choose from (layout=fill is great for background images!)
Gatsby v4 + DatoCMS Crash Course
Last but not least, another great getting started YouTube video, this time by WebDevEducation. This time you'll learn how to make the most out of Modular Content and Structured Text fields with the latest version of Gatsby!
That's it for now!
Well, this closes the announcements for January! Not a bad month, all things considered!
Less interesting to you, but definitely interesting to us as a company, we are working on establishing a profit-sharing program for our employees. Up to this point, the process has been fairly random, but as we add more people to the team, it becomes increasingly important to clarify how things work on this side. It will be heavily inspired by Balsamiq's one, but we'll share more details at the appropriate time.