A bit of a backstory:
I started developing projects in KeystoneJS back in the end of 2016. I was super excited. A CMS. In JavaScript! My language! It wasn’t too long before the codebase got eerie silent. A promise was made in sept 2017. People were asking over (jan 2018) and over (may 2018) and over (feb 2019) why the codebase was so inactive. My 2 cents sparked the maintainer to make another promise and him me and 2 others actually did make a release or 2 the following weeks. After that? Dead silence again. The company behind Keystone had moved on to the completely incompatible and different Keystone 5. A lot of people with a lot of production sites were left hanging out to dry.
So in 2019 I found Strapi. Another CMS running on my languages (JS and MongoDB). It can do all these cool things. I can use it to make Gatsby sites with the GraphQL plugin. And it’s backed by an actual company devoted to this project. I’m in love!
I heavily started to develop my own plugins and am running about 12 projects on Strapi now, making it a core aspect of my company. My lifelyhood is a partially dependant on Strapi.
In April 2021 Strapi revealed it would no longer support MongoDB. Which was sad for me, as well as a big bunch of other people, but I can respect the decision had to be made. A day later Strapi 3.6 released with i18n support. Very cool. May June and August saw some small fixes for Strapi 3.6 and from October 2021 the first releases of Strapi 4 began to land. 30 november 2021 we celebrate the birth of Strapi 4. A bunch of stuff is still missing (like a Sentry plugin or a stable Gatsby source to name a few), but let’s go! No migration guides for our codebases or being a silly one trying to convert a MongoDB project to SQL Strapi v4. We have to wait for those guides to land. One day. So until we can do that, we can work on our production ready Strapi 3 projects, right. Right? 16 feb 2022 saw the and first patch release of Strapi 3 since work on v4 had begun. A small crucial fix to make gatsby-source-strapi
viable for production (which without this it is not…) is closed because the new beta (only supporting Strapi v4) is out. An issue noting a data leak is discarded because it’s not Strapi v4. So where does that leave me? Stuck in limbo? There are no guides how to upgrade to Strapi v4, yet you ask of me to already have done it. How?
Maybe now you understand why I wrote my backstory. This is bringing back terrible memories of being invested in abandoned software.
I understand it is nice to work on new stuff and your new stuff probably excites you more than the old stuff. But please don’t forget about us. The random people out there who are happily running production Strapi v3’s out there for their clients. Give us some time. Give us some time to try v4 for a new project to figure out how it works and how we can try to sell our clients an upgrade. Be that company I can trust in to guide me, not force me, into the future for years and years to come. So I can keep telling all my friends how awesome Strapi is. I really would want that.
With love, Laurens