Hey everyone, it's been a while! We have been pretty quiet in the last weeks. The reason for this is, because we have been working very focused on the redesign of our new systems API. The systems API is basically the API our web app is talking to. It is responsible for creating projects, models, fields, adding members to your team etc. We are happy to announce that we just ported the CMS to the new API and all migrations are complete.
The new API brings a lot of improvements. It is more stable and the new architecture allows great performance improvements. You will notice that the CMS feels more responsive now. But the greatest benefit of the redesign is that we will be able to deliver new features a lot faster. The new API design is also a lot cleaner so that we feel more confident releasing it to our fellow developer community. This will allow you to create and modify projects from your code.
Since it was an API redesign, most changes happened under the hood. However, we also released some cool new CMS features and UI upgrades:
Field Based CRUD Permissions
You are now able to set create, read, update and delete permissions on field level. This means that you can have more control on the public read and write access of your API. For example, you could create a content model FormRequest, which will store customer requests from a website form. You would then add a create permission to each field (see image below) that should be populated via the form. Now you can write data to this model from the outside. You could then add a WebHook to this model to send the form data directly to your slack. A detailed guide on the new permission system will follow soon.
Dedicated Enums
Working with enums has always been a little pain. We are happy to inform you that those days are finally over! We redesigned to enum part of our web app so that you can now create dedicated enums that can be reused throughout your content models. It looks like this:
Improved Richtext and Markdown Editor
We improved our richtext editor so that you can modify HTML directly from the editor. Also you can now embed assets from your asset pool directly in the richtext and markdown editor.
Whats next?
Our list of improvements is growing each day and we receive great input and feature requests from the community. However, the next few weeks will be dominated by launch preparation but our feature roadmap looks currently like this:
- Content Split View
We will introduce a split view for content editing so that you will have your content entry table and editing view on one screen. - Inline Content Creation
This will allow you to create content entries on the fly while adding them to a relation. - Customizable Asset Model
The asset system model is the model where you find all your uploaded files. We will soon allow you to add custom fields to this model so that you can add custom meta data to your assets, like a description, alt-text or tags. - Storing Important Asset-Meta-Data
We will add more meta data fields to the asset model, such as width and height. - Sortable Relations
A heavily requested feature is to allow sorting of related entries via drag and drop. We will schedule this feature asap. - Author System Model
Currently we don't store the author information of a content entry. This essential CMS feature will soon be added. - Content Localization
Allowing to translate content into multiple languages is one of our top prioritized features and will soon land in Hygraph. - Flexible Field Type
We will add a flexible field type that will allow you to add unique field structures to your content entries. - Authentication
This feature will allow you to secure your content with an authentication system to build user-centered sites and applications. - Tons of UX improvements for content editors
We would be happy if you would let us know what you think about the current developments! The best way to get in touch with us is to join our Slack channel.
Cheers,
The Hygraph Team
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