Swapnil Bhartiya: Hi, this is your host Swapnil Bhartiya and welcome to TFiR: Let’s Talk. I cover Strapi here regularly at TFiR. And if you folks already don’t know, it’s one of the leading open source headless CMS, which is 100% JavaScript, it’s extensible and it’s fully customizable. There are some new updates at Strapi and to deep dive into those we have with us once again, Pierre Burgy, co-founder and CEO of Strapi. Pierre, it’s good to have you on the show.

Pierre Burgy: Hey, Swapnil. Thanks a lot for having me.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Yeah. I do know there are some updates at the company, but I want to hear from you. Tell us what’s going on. What’s new.

Pierre Burgy: Yeah. Many thing happened since our last call. We released single sign-on for our enterprise users. We also released content internationalization, so companies can now manage their content in many different languages. We also organized StrapiConf, which was an amazing event with the community. And we reached 40,000 thousand GitHub, 5 million downloads, 700 contributors. And recently, we just announced Strapi v4, which is a significant achievement for the project and for the company. And it’s just the beginning of something really big.

Swapnil Bhartiya: And since you mentioned the Strapi 4, let’s talk about Strapi 4. What’s new there? I mean, new features, new capabilities. Just talk about what’s new.

Pierre Burgy: Yeah. Strapi v4 is really the result and the beginning of our long-term vision for providing a really good developer experience and building a large ecosystem of plugins. In this new version, we drastically improve the performance of Strapi by providing a brand new query builder. It’s now much easier and much powerful to create data and content from the database. And as a result, we provided much more powerful REST API and RESTful API with very advanced filters and advanced data querying.

And as part of our vision for leading a large ecosystem of plugins, we have released a new design system, so any developer can build plugins using different components, which are in this design system. And we also released a plugin API, so developers can use this API to build a new plugin and interact with the core of Strapi, both in the API and in the user interface.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. And since you already mentioned a redesigned UI, tell us why did you do that? Was there any feedback from the community or it was you felt that that was the evolution of the UI?

Pierre Burgy: Yeah. It always starts with the need and we are really committed to making great things for the community. We listen a lot to the community and we make things for our users. And so, as part of this new design system, so, of course, it looks better, so in a more modern way. So that’s one thing.

But more importantly, the access accessibility is much better. With shortcuts with the keyboard, contrast and all of the things. Care is one of our core values and we really wanted to invest in accessibility. And it’s also a need for the community to build those plugins with a very consistent design. And yeah, that’s all the reason why we invested so much in this new design system.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Excellent. It’s been, I mean, quite some time since the company came into existence. Your user base is growing. Are you seeing any new use case here? Or if I can also ask you, what kind of folks are using Strapi? Can you share some insights?

Pierre Burgy: Yeah, of course. We see more and more use cases, like some banks managing content of their ATMs, which is a quite interesting use case. But the vast majority of the use cases are corporate websites which are made with all of this new technologies such as Next.js, Vue.js, Angular and all of the others. Developers want to use all of those frameworks to build faster websites and headless CMS are definitely a good fit. So corporate websites.

Editorial websites, so blogs of course, but with much more advanced needs, especially for content marketing and this kind of things. We also see a significant footprint in e-commerce use cases because headless initially started with the [Amises 00:04:47], but now even e-commerce CMSs are switching to headless. And we see more and more integrations with all of this e-commerce, CMSs and platforms. That’s a growing use case as well. And mobile, it keeps growing as well.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You may be seeing a lot of new use cases, new users. Is it a smooth right for not only your users, but you also? Or you also see because of this growing use cases, there are new challenges because everybody’s bringing their, whether it’s corporate website or developer website, or drill website. Talk about some of the pain points that you see that user are facing, and you are trying to tackle them with either new releases or through support. I just want to understand any friction that is there, or you just know a smooth bed of roses. You just get on the platform and get started and be done.

Pierre Burgy: Yeah, that’s a very good question. In the short term, I would say integrations and editing experience. CMS and especially headless CMS, is at least connected to a front end. But most of the time we see plenty of integration with e-commerce CMS, search online, payment system. And all of the things requires integrations. And that’s why we have this very long-term vision for building a large ecosystem of plugins, which are going to integrate Strapi with all of their services. This is going to be very, very important, and we see a strong need for that.

And we also see that the editing experience can be drastically improved because with headless CMSs, we have the content on one side and on the other side we have the front end. I mean, it’s great for developers. They really love this new approach. But for content editors, they might be a bit lost because the content is in the CMS, but they don’t really understand how it’s displayed in the front end.

That’s why we’re investing a lot in the editing experience. We really want to connect the two things and make something which is great, not only for developers, but also for content editors.

Swapnil Bhartiya: You folks know, released version four. If I may ask you, of course, there are only so much you can share at this point. But if I ask you, what does your roadmap look like? What are the things that you are working on? What are the things that we should be expecting next?

Pierre Burgy: Yeah. Our vision is articulated around create, connect and collaborate. Create is about the developer experience. Connect is about building this large ecosystem of plugins and collaborate is about providing a great editing experience.

That’s our midterm vision, but we see far beyond and at Strapi, we really want to be the best at managing content, but also measuring content, having content that really perform. Because at the end of the day for a company which is managing content at scale, they really want the content to perform. In the upcoming years, we’ll also invest a lot in content performance, like analytics and semantic and all of these kind of things.

We also want to invest in personalized content. Each user will see different content based on their preferences. And yeah, that’s really the kind of things that we are going to do over the next few years.

Swapnil Bhartiya: Pierre, thank you so much for taking time out today. And of course, talk about this new release. And I look forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you.

Pierre Burgy: Thanks again. It was really nice speaking with you today.