A new major version (v5) of our popular Gatsby source plugin is out!

The biggest change introduced by version 5 concerns the management of locales. If until now, for each record, each locale generated a different Gatsby node, now the node is always one, regardless of the number of locales.

On projects with many languages and/or many records, this change produces tremendous savings in memory and build times (up to one order of magnitude).

As a consequence of this change, the way you must write GraphQL queries for localized content is changed.

We know this can be a big annoyance for those who want to upgrade, but on the other hand, everything is now much more similar to the way our GraphQL Content Delivery API works, and the new syntax allows for complex use cases that were simply impossibile to solve before.

For this release, we would like to publicly thank the Gatsby team for their support. We've worked closely together to take full advantage of Gatsby v4's latest customization capabilities, and where issues have arisen, they have been incredibly responsive in fixing them! 🙏

We just completed a comprehensive update of our library for Vue — vue-datocms, now at version 3:

• it now supports both Vue 2 and Vue 3 via VueDemi, thus opening the possibility of easily using Vue composition API with DatoCMS;

• it comes with first-class support for Typescript;

• it has new features, including multiple layout modes for the <Image> component.

We also took the chance for a due upgrade of our demo projects related to Vue. New-comers now have 2 solid starting points:

• vuejs-demo is now based on Vue 3 and the fast Vite.js;

• Nuxt users will enjoy the nuxtjs-demo, now based on Nuxt 3.

Finally, the DatoCMS website now contains two separate learning sections, providing a solid walkthrough for integrating Dato in projects based on Vue.

Our Next.js Blog starter has been updated and now offers the following enhacements:

• Preview Mode also works if you deploy it on Netlify;

• The SEO/Readability Analysis and Web Preview plugins are already installed and configured!

A small addition to our Plugins SDK: inside the renderFieldExtension hook, you can now access ctx.block.

If the field extension is installed in a field of a block, ctx.block returns the ID of the block — or undefined if the block is still not persisted — and the block model.

Our CLI just became a lot smarter, and can now automatically generate a migration script from the differences between two environments!

Read the complete announcement in our Blog.

Within a record, you can now add — and remove — multiple locales at once! Simply select all the locales you are interested in and press the relevant button:

This small change, along with the ability to automatically copy content from the currently selected language, greatly reduces editing time in projects with dozens of locales.

When you enter inside a sandbox environment, the URL of the administrative interface now changes to become the following:

https://<PROJECT-NAME>.admin.datocms.com/environments/<ENVIRONMENT>/editor

This allows you to share a link to a particular record/entity contained in a sandbox environment without confusion to your team members!

Starting October 10th, a couple of changes will be made to the CMA endpoints related to Workflows.

Workflows are a feature enabled in our Enterprise plans, so most of our users won't be affected by this change. All accounts actively using Workflows have already been notified via email about this change. If you did not receive an email, then you have nothing to worry about. 😉

Let's see how the workflow entity will change:

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// Until October 10th:
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{
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  "type": "workflow",
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  "id": "approval_by_editors",
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  "attributes": {
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    "name": "Approval by editors",
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    "stages": [...]
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  }
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}
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// From October 10th:
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{
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  "type": "workflow",
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  "id": "123902133",
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  "attributes": {
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    "name": "Approval by editors",
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    "api_key": "approval_by_editors",
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    "stages": [...]
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  }
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}

As you can see:

• The old ID is now present in the new payload as attributes.api_key;

• The ID becomes a regular DatoCMS ID, immutable during environment forks.

Please note that it will still be possible to fetch, update and delete workflows by passing the API key in the URL, although it is suggested to use the ID.

It will be required to pass the new ID instead of the API key every time a workflow is referenced in another entity relationship (ie. when creating/updating a Model) and inside roles permission rules.

We have recently increased to everybody the maximum number of blocks you can have in a record. The limit have been increased by 50%, from 400 to 600 blocks per record.

This upgrade has been applied as the new minimum to everyone, old and new users.

If you need more blocks for a special use case, please reach out at support@datocms.com

The limit seems high enough, but if you start building complex nested structures that are also translated you can quickly reach the limit. Unfortunately it's not a pricing issue but it's more of a technical limit as we need to run validations on all the new blocks that have been added. To avoid timeouts and long waits on the user's side we have added this limit, but if it's a blocker for you be in touch and we can test higher limits together.

Closely following the release of the new CLI, we also released a new Contentful importer. You can install it as a CLI plugin, it provides faster import times and covers a number of new edge cases that the previous importer could not handle.

For all the information, take a look at the new documentation.