It's time for a new retrospective! In the last one, we had some plans that we were able to follow quite well. I'm going to detail soon what we did and at the end explore a roadmap for the near future. Let's start!
Media area
The main focus of this period has been the empowerment of the media area. We are in the latest phase of polishing, and then we'll release, surely before Christmas!
We are going to detail in a separate blog post, but a little spoiler of what is coming up:
video support
audio preview
tagging (automatic AI-based and manual)
advanced search
Blurhash integration
responsive helpers
Here is a shot of the new media, with EXIF and tags:
and look at all those filters:
Stay tuned for updates; it's going to be the biggest release we've made!
Support 2.0
We've finally finished the transition to our new support system, which means: better priority management, the central role of Community, no more live chat, new support form and more automation behind the scenes.
This change has drastically reduced the time we spend on support allowing us to devote more time to tricky situations and hopefully serving you better and more timely.
Integrations
SSO
In a couple of recent articles, we've already highlighted the integrations with Single Sign-On providers Okta and OneLogin. Azure Active Directory is technically functioning already, not documented as well as the other two, but having implemented SAML2 and SCIM we are compatible with those and more.
Site generators
After the integration with Gatsby preview, we've worked more with Gatsby to provide a smoother integration workflow and also a second demo to try. It's free to try!
Related to site generators we've also worked with Gridsome to make it compatible with DatoCMS, and we've heard good feedback ;)
CMS interface updates
Most important of all it's a general refactor and revamp of our interface, which is now much more friendly to smaller screens.
Together with this significant change, we have worked on a series of other improvements.
The most notable ones are the community translations that allowed you to contribute translations in Spanish, Czech, Dutch, German, Italian, French and more coming up! Thank you!
Also, the CDA explorer integrated into the CMS interface is an excellent and handy addition.
Instead, other minor features are:
improved diff visualization in JSON fields;
ability to rename existing assets;
localisable alt and title on assets, together with additional custom data;
more validations on modular content (e.g. multiple of);
improved and more flexible SEO validations;
default project settings are now optional.
Company updates
A less exciting topic, but significant for us, are our internal company updates. Both on the technical side and the human side.
In September, we have spent some time to make DatoCMS compatible with the new regulation on digital payment by supporting the Strong Customer Authentication. Then we've taken the time to update our legal documents (still partially coming up) with a new security page and a refreshed GDPR page.
More importantly though, now DatoCMS is a company on its own, we've split off Cantiere Creativo, the agency where DatoCMS is born, to try new ventures!
And one news that we can already mention is the new entry of an old-time friend as another full-stack developer! We can't wait :)
Future plans
As always, we would like to provide as much visibility as we can on the future of DatoCMS. So here we are, with our plans for the next coming months.
Settle the new company
We need to take care of the new company by setting up everything correctly. It's essential, but hopefully, not too time-consuming.
We'll also spend some time to onboard our new developer (you'll soon see his face around), that we are sure is going to pay off very quickly.
Staging/sandbox environments
The feature that we feel like it's the most impactful at the moment is to make safe changes in the data schema without impacting the production site.
For this, we are going to implement staging/sandbox environments for both data schema and content. We are not sure yet on the naming and the full details, but surely we'll be in touch when we release.
New pricing
With the new media area and the staging environments, we feel that the current pricing model makes little sense.
We are going to change it radically and simplify it a lot. We'll offer a more generous free plan and only one standard plan, together with improved enterprise solutions.
Together with this, we are going to provide an automatic trial so that you'll be able to test the full product more easily.
All the little things
As usual, we are going to work in parallel on a series of small little features. Very likely we are going to generally improve our interface, improve our plugins and hopefully add some additional niceties to our APIs.
We are very keen on adding an integration with Zeit, together with more demos with Next.JS and also updates to the existing ones.
As usual, we are open to discuss more about this on Community, see you there!