New Collections UI, Faster Dashboards & a Next.js Starter

I'm really excited to share our first product update of 2021. I think you're going to love the new features we've been working on!

New User Interface for Collections

First up is a huge improvement to our Collections dashboard. Collections are one of our core content modeling capabilities. Previously, we presented Collections in a table format that worked really well for a small amount of content. 

We discovered that this table UI didn't work as well when you start to scale out to hundreds or even thousands of items in a single table. So we went back to the old drawing board.

Our updated Collections dashboard is totally revamped to match the new and improved ButterCMS user experience: 

There are a lot of benefits to this new UI. At a very high level, the biggest improvement is the ability to support complex content on a massive scale. Now, all of your content is featured in a convenient and easy-to-use dashboard that includes pagination. The new dashboard has search and filtering capabilities, so you can view content by collection, editor, locale, and status (draft, published, or both). These changes give you greatly-improved access to your Collections content! 

While we were at it, we also improved the publishing workflow for Collections. We made it really easy to create a single piece of content, and now you can choose between saving new content as a draft or publishing it right away.

Previously, each piece of collection content needed to be reviewed and published individually. Now, Collections have the same bulk publishing functionality that you're used to with Pages and Blog Posts. 

Finally, we improved the display labels on collection content. You'll notice that collection items now have a drop-down selection menu at the top right. You can use this selection to define which field you'd like to use as the display label for the collection. 

These changes provide a more simplified, refined, and flexible publishing workflow, and we know you're going to enjoy the new experience. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback! 

Added Support for Ordering Pages by "Created" and "Published" in the API

Beyond the Collections dashboard, we also made some really nice improvements to our API.

When you're working with Pages in the API, you can now sort your pages by the most recent date that pages were published or updated. By default, Pages are returned sorted by update date in descending order. Now, you can reverse that sort to ascending order if you'd prefer to return Pages with the oldest original publish date first. This will give you some additional nice capabilities in the Pages API. 

Enhance Feeds Endpoint to Support category_slug and tag_slug Filter Params

Also in the API, we have an update to our feeds endpoint for our Blog Engine. Feeds is intended to be an SEO-focused feature that allows you to create a sitemap or an RSS feed for your blog posts. Previously, we automatically returned all of your blog posts. Now, you can filter down to a particular category or tag and return only blog posts for that category or tag.

Improved Next.js Starter Project

Let's move on to a more community-focused update.

We recently made some enhancements to our Next.js starter project. You can take a look at the updates in our Github repository: react-cms-blog-with-next-js. We have a preview of the new starter project where you can see the revamped UI, and a lot more of the content modeling capabilities, that are possible with Butter.

I really encourage you to go check this out. And if you'd like to use Next.js for your next project, this is a great way to kick things off with a starter project that's fully integrated with ButterCMS. 

Dashboard Speed Enhancements

And one final note, we've made various performance improvements to the dashboards throughout ButterCMS.

Previously, when you were saving content that was more complex, it may have taken a little time for the dashboard to confirm that your content had been saved. Now, we've revamped our saving algorithm to really improve the performance. From now on, saving should be much faster - even if you're saving a particularly complex piece of content.

So that's a quick overview of the new features and enhancements we've been working on for the past month. We're really excited to bring these to you, and we'd love to hear your thoughts as you start to use them. Stay tuned for more exciting updates coming up soon. Cheers!