DatoCMS is still growing. In the last months, we released several improvements to make it a better tool for any editorial need. We received so many feedbacks from our clients and partners, and we worked hard to release new features that enable multiple editorial teams to work together with developers and marketers to build and manage contents in a comfortable, easy and secure way.
You can find all the latest features we shipped in our Product Changelog.
Is that it? No! Last week we released DatoCMS Plugins, and this is a vast improvement for our community. With plugins, any developer can inject new functions to create custom components to handle different scenarios for any team.
The release of plugins it's not just a release like any other, that's a big milestone for DatoCMS. With plugins, we ask every developer using DatoCMS to be a part of our project. We want to create not only the best headless CMS ever, but we also want to build a community of clients and developers working together.
We want DatoCMS to keep moving forward, and we want to do it by making you part of the process, so we ask you to vote what features you want us to work in the next months.
Which one would you like the most?
Open sourcing the DatoCMS web app
Releasing the React web app powering the administration area of every DatoCMS project as an open source software. Anyone could create a custom editing experience. This way, you can build a custom dashboard for every client: colors, logo, font and so on, obviously. What about building a new index page based on Masonry? Do whatever your clients need.
Edit your website as you browse it
That is, no more dashboard or backend to edit content. If your site fetches data in real-time from our GraphQL Content Delivery API, just add a snippet of JS code on your site and from that moment you can change every single piece of content directly from your frontend site. Do you need to change your homepage title? Double-click on the title, write the new title, save and it's done!
Sandbox environments and easier data migration
Think about this scenario: your site is running online and you need to work on a new version. This often requires changing the schema of your models. Dealing with this situation is not that easy. You need to duplicate the models and the data that you need to edit; then you have to go online with the new version of your site and, finally, you have to delete old models and data. The solution could be releasing Sandbox Environments. When you create a new sandbox environment, every model and record will be duplicated there, without having to worry about breaking the live version of the website. Now rather than change the schema of the sandbox environment directly from the interface, use JS code to describe the changes you need to make to your models, so that when the new version of the website is ready they can be reproduced on the production schema.
Medium-like editor
Our Modular Content field is really powerful, but not ideal in terms of user-friendliness when you need to write, for example, an article. We want to add a new type of field specific for this scenario, one that allows records and uploads to be both linked dynamically and embedded within the flow of the text. A new modular content experience similar to the way you build an article on Medium, or using Gutenberg on Wordpress.
Better assets management
Every image/file you upload in DatoCMS is stored on imgix, a super-fast CDN optimized for image delivery. By adding some parameters to your image URL, you can enhance, resize and crop images, compress them and change format for better performance, create complex compositions and extract useful metadata. The transformations happen on-the-fly and get cached on the CDN as well for future reuse. This is one of the most appreciated features inside DatoCMS, but we could provide image manipulation directly inside the UI of the admin area, letting not only developers but also editors crop, set focal point, adding effects, etc.
Creating apps with DatoCMS
Right now DatoCMS is the best tool to create very complex backend solutions efficiently and deliver content into any kind of application (sites, apps, you name it). But what if you could use DatoCMS not only to create great websites but full-fledged apps?
Releases
Let’s say you need to manage an editorial team for an online magazine. You are working on a new issue releasing next month. You have to create new articles, new authors, etc. When you are ready, you can publish every single piece of new content. That is a lot of work! We want to introduce the concept of "Releases." Using releases, you can add new contents to a release (something like "September issue") and then you can set a publication date (e.g. "September 1st"). All you've got to do now is wait for the deadline and you can have a beer or a coffee in the meanwhile.
Manage complex editorial workflow
A set of new features that will make your editorial team more productive. Our goal is to make DatoCMS a better tool to manage editorial workflow and team with tools: task, notifications, calendar and so on!
Let’s do it! Help us to choose which features will be realized first!
If you have new ideas or requests, we are very happy to listen to you. Just jump into #feature-request channel on Slack or submit an issue to this Github repository.