Product Updates

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.

Some updates about what we've released last month in preparation for our next big feature that is coming very soon: the staging environments!

Let's see the spring cleaning we've done:

Deployment environments are now Build triggers

The new feature we are going to launch is going to be called "environments", so to avoid confusion and also to give a clearer name to the former "deployment environments", we've renamed them to "build triggers".

In fact they are manual triggers that launch your build in external systems, we hope will make more sense for everyone!

This will unfortunately cause also a change in the CMA:

• deployment_environment is now build_trigger

• deploy_event is now build_event

Reference models by API keys

When using the CMA, you can now reference models by using API keys instead of model ids. For now you can only do that when passing the API key in the URL or on filters. It's still a work in progress, soon you'll be allowed to use API keys in payloads as well.

As a nice side note, the usage of API key is also available when filtering webhooks.

Bugfix - react-datocms IE11 compatibility

We've released a new version of react-datocms (v1.2.2) that fixes a compatibility issue with IE11.

Bugfix - duplicating item in tree structure

When duplicating an item in a tree structure, the new item will have the same parent of the duplicated one.

Bugfix - change link validations

When changing link validations we are now providing an extra alert message, as this can potentially lead to data loss.

We'll release in a few days a change in our CDA that will affect some edge cases in filtering.

Please find all the details in our documentation: https://www.datocms.com/docs/content-delivery-api/changelog#20200511---changes-in-graphql-filtering

We've just released a round of updates on the plugin SDK and the plugins that we maintain.

We've added to the SDK the following methods/properties:

• scrollToField(...pathChunks) - Plugins can use this method to navigate the record form.

• saveCurrentItem() - Plugins can use this method to trigger a record save action without pushing the save button.

• notice(message) and alert(message) - Use these methods to display UI consistent notifications and alerts.

• itemStatus - Information about the publishing status of the record the plugin is attached to.

• isSubmitting - Information about the record's form submitting status.

Read all the details on the SDK in the documentation.

Together with the SDK update we've released a new plugin:

• Field anchor menu - A plugin that creates a sidebar menu that link to the fields in your record

and a few updates:

• in the Conditional fields plugin - added a new option, invert, that inverts the logic of conditional fields - ie. show slave fields if master boolean is false.

• in the Yandex translate plugin - we've fixed a bug that prevented the plugin to work with all_locales_required = false

• Upgraded all dependencies and SDK

• Removed localtunnel as default option as it's not maintained anymore and you can do withouth

We are very proud to announce our latest integration, with Vercel!

You can now add Vercel as a deployment environment. You can trigger a build as usual from DatoCMS for static site generators but you can also use that to clear the cache of a Next.JS application.

Read all the details in our blog post about this.

When using assets in rich text fields we couldn't detect them as "in use" in our media area filters.

But now instead we are doing that, so if you want to clear some space, deleting some unused assets from your media area, you are now good to go! The "in use" filter is now safer to use.

Last but not least, if you replace an asset we'll replace the URLs for you in all the rich text fields! This was sort of expected behaviour, but not implemented. Now it is and as a bonus we are doing it also on JSON fields, making also plugins that were saving assets in those fields more reliable.

We have just launched a highly voted feature request on Community: the possibility to set a default value for each locale, in the field settings, like so:

We took some time to improve our UI, mainly following the suggestions that came through the feature requests over at Community.

Thank you very much for sharing your ideas, they are really making DatoCMS better every day! We are very grateful for all your feedbacks.

Here comes the list of the most recently released.

Menu item with custom internal links

When adding menu items in the left navigation you can now open an "External URL" in the same tab.

This allows you to create custom links to filtered models or specific pages of the CMS, customising even more the structure of a DatoCMS instance.

Change language of UI

We have been adding community-contributed UI translations in the past few months.

So now that we have a few we've added this switch:

to let you manually pick your preferred translation, if you want to override the browser's default selection.

Remember size of sidebar

Minor improvement, but now we remember the size that you have picked for the sidebar, as you have requested on Community. Thank you ;)

Ability to collapse branches in tree-like collections

If you have a big tree-like collection of records you will be pleased to know that you can now collapse the branches to improve navigation. Thank you for your suggestion!

Add record ID in sidebar

A small but handy addition is the record ID in the sidebar. Previously was present only on the address bar of the browser, which made it invisible when opening records in modals. Showing it in the sidebar will make it always visible and hopefully more useful.

Show real deploy URL instead of dummy in global SEO

We've implemented and launched another little UX improvement coming from a suggestion on Community. It's about using a real deployment URL rather than a dummy address in the global SEO settings. Thank you!