What Strapi CMS Offers: A Feature Rundown

Strapi is an open-source headless Content Management System (CMS) offering complete infrastructure ownership. Created in 2015 by the French startup Strapi Solutions, Strapi has quickly grown into one of the most popular headless CMS platforms.

Strapi CMS puts users in full control of their content infrastructure and front-end stack. It stores content that is accessible via powerful APIs rather than templates. This decoupled approach provides freedom to build sites, apps, and experiences on any platform!

Key Highlights

• Exploring Strapi headless CMS features and capabilities 
• Managing content with Strapi
• Editing and Collaboration with Strapi 
• Benefits and use cases of Strapi
• Comparison of Strapi with other headless CMS platforms

Strapi is an Open Source Headless CMS. Is it Customizable?

A key advantage of Strapi is the ability to create customized content structures using customizable content types, fields, and relationships. Both developers and non-technical users can author content within this flexible environment. It offers the versatility that traditional CMS fails to deliver!

With its un-opinionated flexibility, focus on custom content modeling and developer-first approach, Strapi is great for teams building content-centric applications, multichannel experiences, and decoupled Jamstack sites. It integrates with leading frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js.

Fully Customizable Content Architecture

One of Strapi's most powerful features offers the ability to completely control and configure your content data structures, allowing users to define custom content types with fields like text, images, components, JSON, and relationships.

This can be done visually via the admin panel or directly in code for greater flexibility, enabling developers to create tailored structures without being limited to predefined content types.

Role-based Access Control

Strapi comes with a sophisticated role-based access control system for managing roles and permissions. You can define roles like Editor, Author, Administrator, etc. You can specify granular permissions like creating, editing, deleting, or publishing content on a per-content-type basis.

Media Library

The Media Library plugin allows users to manage all uploaded assets from the Media Library, either via its own interface or through the Content Manager. Users can upload new assets, create folders, sort, filter, and search for specific media while also being able to customize views.

API and Integrations

Once content types and fields are defined, Strapi automatically generates APIs for fetching the content from anywhere. It supports both REST and GraphQL APIs out of the box, making content easily consumable across devices and platforms.

These integrations provide a standardized way to access content that can power everything, from mobile apps to websites. It reduces development time while allowing developers to easily customize the endpoints and responses as needed.

Plugin Ecosystem

Strapi has a robust and active community that extends the platform's functionality. Plugins can add capabilities like a user authentication system, notifications, documentation, localization, analytics, and more. Many plugins work out of the box while still being customizable. This ecosystem allows the core of Strapi to stay lean while letting developers add features on demand.

Hosting Flexibility

Strapi gives you full control over the hosting environment. You can host and run Strapi yourself on your servers or infrastructure. This avoids vendor lock-in, offering unlimited flexibility to customize your setup.

You only pay for the hosting you choose rather than being forced into proprietary hosting. Strapi puts you in control of your content management!

Releases

Releases in Strapi allow content managers to group entries from various content types and locales for simultaneous publish or unpublish actions. Accessible from the admin panel, the Releases view lets users create new releases, see pending and completed ones, check schedules, and manage content within each release for streamlined publishing workflows.

Strapi uses a custom content modeling system that is designed to be highly flexible and extensible. It enables the creation of custom content structures that can be tailored based on specific requirements.

Content Types

The primary way in which the content is modeled in Strapi is through content types. They act as content schemas or blueprints. For example, you may define content types like "Articles", "Products", "Pages", "Events" etc. Each type represents a category of content with its fields.

Configurable Fields

Within each content type, you configure a set of fields that make up the structure of that content. Strapi offers an extensive set of field types, including:

Each field can be configured with parameters like making it required, searchable, translatable, setting default values, and more.

Defining Relationships

Relationships allow connecting and referencing other content. For example, an "Article" content type may have an "Author" relationship field that references the "Author" content type. Thus, enabling the building of complex relational data models.

Creating Content Type UI

In the admin UI, content types can be created through the intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Developers can visually design the content structure.

Programmatic Content Types

They can also be defined as code in files for versioning and portability. The code approach allows the creation of advanced custom fields and configurations not available through the visual interface.

Evolving Content Model

One of Strapi's major strengths is the flexibility to modify your content structure as needs change. You can add new content and its types, modify fields in existing types, change relationships, customize validations, and more.

Intuitive Admin UI

Strapi offers an intuitive user interface for managing content. It allows non-technical users to easily create, organize, and update content.

Inline Editing

When viewing the content, fields can be edited directly inline without having to a separate editor. This allows for quick updates on the fly.

Draft/Publish Workflow

Strapi has a draft/published workflow. Content authors can create drafts, which can then go through an approval process before being published live.

Scheduled Publishing

Content can also be scheduled to be published or unpublished at specific dates/times in the future. This allows planning content updates and automating publishing.

Versioning

Drafts are versioned in Strapi, so you can see a history of changes over time or revert to older versions if needed.

Permissions

Granular user permissions allow restricting access and capabilities per content type. For example, an author may only be able to create and edit their content entries.

Localization

The Community Edition of Strapi supports localizing content into multiple languages/locales. Content can be translated and managed for global audiences.

Collaboration

With customizable workflows and permissions, Strapi enables teams to collaborate while ensuring content integrity. Roles like author, editor, moderator, and publisher can work together.

Complete Customization

One of Strapi's biggest strengths is its flexibility and customizability. Developers have complete control to integrate with the choice of technology stack and customize:

Content architecture - Create any content types and structures needed.

Integration - Fully configure the auto-generated APIs. Add custom endpoints.

Admin UI - Modify and extend the panel UI/UX.

Plugins - Install and develop custom plugins.

This level of customization enables developers to build a headless solution (backend and frontend) tailored to specific needs.

Developer Experience

Strapi is designed with the developer's ease of use in mind. The architecture, APIs, plugin system, and configuration options, provide a developer-friendly CMS. From the choice of frontend framework, presentation layer(s), etc. Strapi gives complete control over how you want to display your content and create customized user journeys and experiences.

Hosting at Will

Strapi can be self-hosted. This avoids vendor/SaaS lock-in. Developers have full control over their deploy environment.

Open-Source

The community edition of Strapi will always be free and source (released under MIT license). Developers can contribute to the platform.

Active Community

The Strapi community is an active/growing community of developers building plugins, extensions, documentation, and more. Community support is excellent and collaborative to give its users the best of features, functionality, and more.

Database Agnostic

Strapi works with many database types: MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, etc. Developers can use their preferred database.

Scalability

Strapi can scale from simple use cases to enterprise-level deployments. The platform is production-ready and battle-tested.

JavaScript Framework

Since Strapi is built with Node.js and JavaScript, it integrates smoothly into JavaScript stacks and developers can program it easily. Moreover, other integrations become readily available like Google Analytics, Heatmap software, etc. Everything is ready to integrate!

Plugin Ecosystem

Hundreds of community plugins extend Strapi's functionality - from authentication to localization to SEO.

Jamstack Websites

Strapi is a popular choice for providing content APIs and infrastructure to Jamstack sites built using Next.js, Gatsby, Nuxt.js, etc. The flexible content modeling and developer-friendly APIs make it ideal for decoupled Jamstack architectures.

Web Applications

The auto-generated REST and GraphQL APIs allow consuming content in mobile apps (React Native, Flutter, etc) and hybrid apps (Progressive Web Apps, Electron apps). Strapi content can power the apps.

Custom Admins & Dashboards

Strapi's APIs facilitate building custom panels and dashboards. Developers can craft tailor-made authoring experiences and interfaces.

Headless E-commerce

For headless e-commerce using a separate front-end layer, Strapi provides the back-end content and product catalog. Customers and orders can also be modeled.

Blogs & Editorial

For blogs, online magazines, and editorial sites, Strapi delivers the authoring environment and content infrastructure. Content editors can manage articles.

Multichannel Content

Strapi's flexibility helps manage content centrally across different channels like web, mobile, connected devices, etc. Content is synced everywhere.

Enterprise & Large Sites

Strapi scales to enterprise-level and high-traffic sites. Robust features like permissions, and workflows facilitate large teams and sites.

The Self-hosted Enterprise Edition is designed for businesses that require strong security and compliance features, allowing users to customize and scale their applications with confidence.

Additionally, for those who prefer a fully managed solution, Strapi also provides Cloud Hosting options. These allow users to run Strapi in production with minimal setup, featuring plans like Developer, PRO, and Team. 
 

Stripe - Leading online payment platform. Uses Strapi to manage documentation and tutorial content for their API and developer docs site. Choose Strapi for its developer experience and extensibility to customize their docs content infrastructure.

Product Hunt - Popular product discovery platform. Uses Strapi to manage content for their community website and Product Hunt app. Needed a flexible and scalable CMS for their community-driven content.

IBM - Multinational technology company. IBM uses Strapi to create and manage its websites and mobile applications content. 

Walmart - Multinational retail corporation. Walmart uses Strapi to create and manage its websites and mobile applications content.

The Food Network - Major media brand for food entertainment. Adopted Strapi for their recipe website to consolidate content across channels. Strapi provides content APIs for their apps, sites, and internal tools.

They leverage Strapi's developer-oriented architecture, and extensible content modeling, and integrate it into diverse platforms and experiences.

In conclusion, Strapi stands out as a robust, flexible, and developer-oriented headless CMS for building customized content infrastructure.

For developers who prioritize control, extensibility, and personalization in their tech stack, Strapi hits all the right notes. Its -open-source self-hosted architecture means you can fully own your content authoring, management, and distribution pipelines without vendor lock-in.

By putting content structure, APIs, and the admin UI fully in developers' hands, Strapi enables you to craft solutions tailored precisely to your needs. No opinions imposed, no restrictions on data modeling or frontend tech. Just pure customization and configuration capabilities.

Beyond the technical advantages, Strapi delivers a smooth developer experience that sets it apart. The documentation and guides are excellent, the APIs and architecture are intuitive, and the community provides outstanding support. Whether you're just getting started or building complex systems, Strapi scales well.

Trends like headless architecture, Jamstack, and decoupled content management will continue accelerating, and Strapi is well-positioned to ride that wave.