After two months and a half of focused work, it's with joy — and relief 😅 — that we announce a complete rework of our public-facing website!
As you'll see, it's not (only) a graphical make-over, but it brings to life some structural changes we had in mind for a long time to make it more informative and useful both to existing customers and potential new ones, while making room for new sections over the coming months.
Here's a quick recap of the changes! 🔬
New section: the Marketplace!
The old website did a poor job at presenting the moltitude of first-class integrations we built over the years. Our new Marketplace section is a response exactly to that.
In the marketplace you'll find our ready-to-be-published starter projects covering countless different frontend technologies (Next.js, Gatsby.js, Vue/Nuxt.js, Hugo, etc.):
Our growing catalog of community plugins has moved into the Marketplace section as well, making even more clear that everyone can create, fork and publish their own DatoCMS plugin to customize and expand the capabilities of our product.
Our wonderful users have already built all sorts of plugins, ranging from ones that let you interact with data coming from third-parties (Gatsby Cloud, Netlify Identity, Shopify, to sidebar widgets (To-do lists, Inverse relationships), to new kind of fields you can use to better edit your content (Tag editor, Star-rating, Multiselect):
Our incredibly useful integrations with Hosting/CI platforms like Netlify, ZEIT, Travis and Gitlab have also been moved from our docs to the Marketplace so that they're now more prominent. We want to make it really clear that no matter the stack you're using, we've got you covered 💪
Last but not least, our Enterprise apps have found a new home as well:
Documentation
Our documentation is now more clean, readable and complete than ever. First we made sure to replace all the outdated screenshots we accumulated — it happens when you release new features like crazy 🤗 — with new mini-videos that better support the covered concepts.
We've also added new guides for React, Vue.js and Next.js, and a new guide better describing how to import content into DatoCMS. We're still in the process of improving the reference for our Content Management API, and it will be shipped in the next few weeks.
Support
Our Support page now requires you to specify the topic of your issue, so that we can immediately offer you useful resources that are already covered in our knowledge base. This should help both parts (you and us), avoiding useless loss of time when it's not needed:
The stack
As a side note, it's worth mentioning that the new website is powered by Next.js and is hosted on ZEIT Now. During its development, we closely followed the canary build of Next.js to take advantage of the new data fetching primitives and Preview Mode that now are available from version 9.3.
Frankly, the experience has been amazing, both from the point of view of development speed and editing of the content. The ability to see a live preview of what you're writing, in production, without having to wait for a build to complete is simply exceptional.
This is how I'm writing this very article:
Wrap up!
Well, that's it for today! We have still a few sections to ship waiting for approval — did anyone say use cases? — but overall we're very pleased with the final result.
There still might be some corners to round off, so if you find anything strange please don't hesitate letting us know on Support, Community or Twitter!