To help editors understand the purpose of each block, we just shipped a new field called Help text that you configure to shown some human-friendly description on the content editing side.

As a bonus, if the field starts with an image URL, it will be shown alongside the help text. Quite handy, isn't it? 😃

Today we launched a series of UI changes to the schema editing area that we hope will make it clearer and quicker to make changes, especially regarding blocks.

First of all, models can now be filtered with a handy search bar:

The biggest changes, however, are related to blocks. A new Blocks Library section is now visible on the sidebar, giving you an overview of all the blocks your project has defined:

You can also quicky find which Modular Content/Structured Text fields are using a specific block, and move to the field in a single click:

The inverse operation — that is, moving from a Modular Content/Structured Text field to one of its blocks — is one click away too:

To specify which blocks can be used in a Modular Content/Structured Text field, head over to its settings, under the Validations tab:

A long overdue update on all the UI improvements we've recently released:

Now you can set alt and title in images within the multiline string with the HTML editor:

We've been receiving feedbacks around our SEO fields that were suggesting that we had validation rules that were too strict. So now we've added the option to pick whatever minimum or maximum length for the slug, SEO title and SEO description. You can customize those per field:

And also, you can now customize the validation rules for the slug field, so that you can set your custom regular expression, if our default one is too strict for your use case:

You can now specify in which locale the record filter applies:

We have removed the limit of 30 records that you could batch update. This was particularly annoying when doing batch action across pages, almost a bug fix :)

And finally... you can now close modals pressing the Escape key!

With the latest v0.1.0 release of the Plugin SDK we've added a couple methods:

• selectItem(itemTypeId, { multiple }) - Plugins can use this method to show a modal dialog to select one or multiple existing records

• selectUpload({ multiple: boolean }) - Plugins can use this method to show a modal dialog to select one or multiple uploads

• editUpload(uploadId) - Plugins can use this method to show the modal dialog to edit an upload

• editUploadMetadata(uploadMetadata) - Plugins can use this method to show the modal dialog to edit an upload metadata.

These new methods will allow the creation of plugins for the link fields. You can read all the details in the SDK reference.

Then, related to the media fields, we've released v3.2.0 of our JS client which:

• adds support for aborting createUploadPath, uploadFile and uploadImage through uploadPromise.cancel

• adds additional option arguments to createUploadPath, uploadFile and uploadImage

• adds options.onProgress for tracking the upload progress of createUploadPath, uploadFile and uploadImage

• adds options.filename for renaming files uploaded with createUploadPath, uploadFile and uploadImage

These new methods will let you create plugins for the media fields and manage the uploads from your end.

You can see the client docs for more details and examples.

On the Ruby gem, we've added the method #lqip_data_url, which lets you access the SVG blurred up version of your images, like so:

blog_post.cover_image.url(w: 800, h: 600, fm: :jpg)
# => "https://www.datocms-assets.com/123/12345-heart.png?w=800&h=600&fm=jpg"

blog_post.cover_image.lqip_data_url(w: 800, h: 600, fm: :jpg)
# => "data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wCEAAoHBwgHBgoICAgXFQoLDhUSDhUXDh0eDRUVGRYZGBYTFhUaIi0jGh0oHRUWJDUlKC0vMjIyGSI4PTcwPCsxMi8BCgsLDg0OHBAQHDsoIig7Lzs7Ozs7Ozs7LzsvLy8vLy8vLzsvLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vLy8vL//AABEIAA0AGAMBIgACEQEDEQH/xAAYAAEAAwEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAwQFAv/EABwQAAAHAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABAgMEBRESQf/EABUBAQEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMB/8QAHREAAQMFAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQAREgITITFCA//aAAwDAQACEQMRAD8AqPMJiF1o6jvlILkhlWU11aMMTU6j50UPHKcCmTJa1aXEnvoBdy3GmTNPgAwfTkpbNJ2F/9k="

For more details on what you can do, please have a look at this blog post.

On the Plugin SDK, we've added a new method plugin.disableField(...pathChunks, disable) that will let you disable a field so that the editors will be prevented to make changes.

Read all the details on the SDK reference.

We've recently launched a new feature that allows every user to customize the format in which the date and time are displayed.

Under User settings > Localization Settings you can find this screen:

In which you'll be able to pick your date and time format together with the options of showing times in the 24h format.

We hope to have covered all your date/time formatting needs with this.

Just a quick update to announce that we have finally made our famous Blurhash-based LQIPs available on our Gatsby plugin, replacing the classic “blur-up” technique used by everyone so far.

The improvement is evident, especially when the images are shown particularly large within the web page:

You don't need to make any code changes to your Gatsby project to get the enhancement, just upgrade the gatsby-source-datocms package using your packet manager of choice (npm or Yarn), making sure you are installing a version higher than or equal to 2.4.0:

npm update gatsby-source-datocms
yarn upgrade gatsby-source-datocms

Enjoy!

We have just released a new update of our CMS area where we show usage stats.

Now we are providing a very granular set of statistics about assets, API calls and videos, to help you troubleshoot where you can optimize or better understand where the traffic is coming from.

With all this information we are sure you'll be able to better optimize your sites, in order to get better performance and saving some money! We hope to help you with this.

As a small note, we have also improved our interface to optimize the loading of big projects. This should speed up everyone, but should be felt more by big projects.

Finally, we have upgraded the dashboard to better show the projects on which you are only a collaborator and not the owner and also show who is the owner when you try to do actions restricted to them. Hopefully this will simplify management of the projects.

We have refreshed our documentation at large in the past weeks and also provided more examples for record creation, field creation and role creation. This is just a highlight but more has come already.

If you still think anything is lacking in our documentation, please let us know via Community, thanks!

Unfortunately we need to ask everyone who is using Ruby client with a version older than 0.7.3 to upgrade.

New builds might break as we had to change something in our schema to fix a bug that was allowing old versions of the Ruby client to work.

Version 0.7.3 was released on 2 Jul 2019 so most of you should probably be safe, but please double check.