Hey all I’m a fairly new user to strapi, and fairly novice when it comes to full-stack development, but I’d like to throw in my two cents please forgive my naivety.
To start I’ve been a designer / web developer for years, I work with several clients, small - medium sized at best. I understand my needs and use case probably won’t align with the core target demographic for Strapi.
Personally I have more front-end experience than I do back-end, and to that end Strapi gives me what wordpress gave me for the front-end —- a few years back when I was starting out, and that is a set of “training wheels”. Although I can navigate around databases and have somewhat of a working understand of SQL related backends, I personally do not feel confident enough to manage a custom implementation on my own. The more I learn the more I find that there are more things that DO NOT understand than things that I actually do. For this reason, I have gravitated towards Strapi, it feels like a set of training wheels, there are some best practices in place and a few abstractions as well. I appreciate that.
All this is to say that I’d like to see the CE version remain a bit as it is, with high marks for usability provided with sensible options for building on top of what already exists. For me this feels like a great way to grow the community as Strapi already does with plugins and such.
So my two cents really is this…
I think you guys should def find a solid form of monetization, but I believe the real strength of Strapi is in it’s flexibility. I’ve tried several other CMS’s (of various varieties) and I have to say the biggest advantage of Strapi is that it’s usable.
Just for contrast I recently worked with a Sanity based CMS for a project, and although it was fairly easy to get along with I was turned off by the monitoring they did in the dashboard, tracking your usage and limiting it to a certain amount (don’t recall the exacts), but that was enough to turn my off before I got too far in, for someone like me who learns my making mistakes (often a ton of em), something that was tracking my mistakes felt like a huge issue, especially in development!!
I hope that makes sense, I apologize for the rant… really loving Strapi and hope to get to point to be able to contribute some goodness to the community! Thank you for all your hard work and efforts you are appreciated!