Hello friends,
I hope you have found time to enjoy some well-deserved holidays! 🏖️ 🏔️
On our side, despite the summer silence, we have been working hard to bring you several big improvements, which we now look forward to sharing. There's a lot to cover!
We are also very happy to let you know that we are further expanding the team to continue to provide you with the best possible support and to keep pushing more features and useful content!
We'll uncover our newest team additions next month, but this year, expect even more from DatoCMS! 😉
Simplified pricing
The first important news is that starting November 1, we will make some changes in pricing for all new customers.
The Scale and the Professional plan will be merged into a single plan. The cost of the monthly new Professional plan will remain the same (€199/month), but we are reducing the discount on yearly billing (from 50% to 30%), so the new prices will be from €149/month. On the other hand we are reducing the price of extra projects from €59/month to €29/month.
This change will impact only new customers, with no change for existing ones. If you are interested in the price of the current Professional plan or want to move from one of our legacy to the newer plans, you still have about a month to start a subscription and secure the current terms indefinitely!
Read the announcementImproved DX with immutable IDs on fork
We're so excited about this one. Long story short, when you now fork a project environment, the copy will be 100% identical to the original one, including the IDs.
This makes things so much easier for developers: migrations and third-party applications/lambdas that communicate with DatoCMS can now safely rely on stable IDs to pick resources, and the adoption of safer environment-based workflows can be completely transparent to the outer world.
Learn moreBetter editing experience with improved filters
Record filters have been greatly improved and now act as fully-fledged views, storing also a preference of ordering, and the table columns most suitable to consume a specific filtering:
It is also possible to point menu items on the navigation bar to a specific shared filter, so that final editors will immediately see everything they need, without any tweaking!
The usual round of minor improvements 😜
In addition to the biggest changes, we also managed to squeeze in a number of smaller (but very welcome!) improvements requested by our Community:
In the Presentation tab of Structured Text fields, it is now possible to enable only specific heading levels;
Imgix transformation parameters are now available for SVG assets;
The Plugin SDK now offers more information on blocks used in a record;
Site Search now supports a new "fuzzy" search option which returns more results;
A new Contentful importer has been released, to be used with the the CLI we released on May.
New plugins available on the Marketplace
A huge thanks to all of you for creating another round of incredible plugins, and for sharing them with the community! This month we're highlighting the following ones:
Record Bin adds trash bin functionality to your projects! Every deleted record is moved to trash via a lambda function, and can also be restored from the interface!
Icon Font Picker lets your editor visually select an icon from any icon font of your choice!
Saleor lets you quickly find Saleor products and variants and link them to DatoCMS
Kontainer lets your editors browse and select images from your Kontainer application and use their URLs in DatoCMS
From our blog
We also tried to create some new introductory content for those who are not already inside the headless world, and want to understand all the benefits of this approach:
Partner quote of the month
The Agency Partner Program continues to register new members (+70!) and is growing stronger than ever. Here's one of the latest quotes from our Wall of Love:
DatoCMS is faster and more powerful than any other existing solution. It allows our team to easily manage our marketing and e-commerce platforms. We've been using this CMS for years and couldn't be happier with the results. As a customer, you can expect exceptional support and service. Our customers love it too!
What's coming up...
The next few months will be packed with big news. We're not ready to share the exact release dates yet — and we don't want to rush things to get to a deadline! — but here's what we have on our plates right now:
Inverse relationships on Content Delivery API
This one of the most requested features on Community. Link fields allow you to define relationships to external records (ie. a blog post can have a link to its author), but on the GraphQL side you cannot get the reverse relationship with a single query (ie. give me all the blog posts written by the author whose name is "John Doe").
We are experimenting and testing various inverse querying modes on the GraphQL side, so that we can solve this problem once and for all, and in the best possible way!
Automatic generation of migration scripts between environments
Sandbox environments and migrations offer a safe, solid way to manage and maintain your content structure over time, but right now you loose one of the core strengths of DatoCMS: the convenience of a graphical interface for editing your content schema.
Well, now that IDs are immutable at the fork of an environment, it finally becomes possible to work on an automatic migration script generation tool!
The idea is simple: fork an environment, make the necessary changes to the schema on the newly created sandbox via UI, and get back a migration script that makes the necessary calls to our CMA to adapt the original environment to the applied changes.
Improve the Vue.js toolkit and get to feature-parity with React
Our existing set of Vue.js components and utilities is working just fine, but can be greatly improved. We waited some time to let the Vue ecosystem settle down a little after the big Vue 3 revolution... but now we're ready to go!
The new major version of our integration toolkit will be more leaned towards Vue 3 hooks and logic composition patterns, and will offer an overall better developer experience. The plan is also to offer exactly the same features available on our React toolkit package, down to every prop.
New official plugins: automatic scheduled backups, and web previews
We're also working on a some new plugins that are going to be useful for pretty much any existing project:
The first one will allow to make Scheduled Backups of a project content, by forking the primary environment into sandbox environments. You'll be in charge of configuring both the frequency of the backups and their retention time. And since these are environments, restoring them is always a matter of seconds.
The second one is an official Web Preview plugin. Our Marketplace is full of third-party plugins that offers editors a link to view the record they're working on inside the final frontend... and each has their own set of strengths/weaknesses. We'd like to simplify things, and build a generic solution to the problem, capable of handling pretty much any possible setup.
That's it for this month!
Woah, this was a long post to write. I told you we worked hard this summer! 😆 If you have any question/suggestions, as always, feel free to reach us on Community.
See you next month!