Video Support, Better Collections Workflow, and more!

Hope you are doing well! Really excited to tell you what we've been working on for the month of October.

Very high-level, we added video support to Media Library, we improved the workflow for Collections, improved the API Explorer, return created and published dates for Pages in the API, and finally, we've invested engineering time into further improving the performance of our API when querying Collections.

Video support to media library for Enterprise customers

We've added video support to the Media Library for Enterprise customers. So for some customers, you use video platforms like YouTube to host videos and then copying embed codes into Butter, which works great! However, for some Enterprises, you want to be able to upload native video right into ButterCMS and serve it seamlessly along with your other content, now you can do that.

We also enhanced our Media Library to show you a really cool preview of the video in the Media Library and throughout the entire dashboard. It works just like you'd expect it to. it's seamless and it looks great.

Better workflow for Collections

The next thing we've done is we've enhanced the workflow for Collection items. Now, when you go into Collections, you can directly save drafts right in the 'Add/Edit Item' view. So, you can save drafts and you can publish Collection items all from one screen. This is much more in line with the kind of workflow that you experience with Blog Posts and Pages and we're excited to bring it to Collections.

Previously, you have to go into the 'Test Mode,' make changes there, and then all the changes would need to be bulk-published together. However, you no longer have to do that! Now, you have a much more streamlined workflow and granular control of which items get published and when.

Revamped API Explorer

The next thing we worked on was our API Explorer. Previously, it used to be a little pop-up window, but we've totally revamped it and redesigned it. Now, it displays a really nice full-width panel view with side by side of the JSON of the response for the content you are fetching, as well as a code sample for your actual tech stack. You can click on the drop-down and pick your exact tech stack, and you'll see that the actual code snippet to fetch this exact piece of content that you're looking at is shown in the right panel view. Pretty awesome and we're really excited to offer this to you and hopefully it makes it even easier to integrate Butter into your application!

Native Published and Updated Timestamps for Pages

The other enhancement that we've done is we added 'Published Date' and 'Updated Date' timestamps to the API when your fetching Pages from our API. This was a really popular request to have the native published and updated timestamps for a given page or a set of pages returned in the API. And this is really helpful when you need to know the last time a page was updated or when it was first published for various reasons. Sometimes you just want to display this date right on your actual website or application and now you have that available.

This automatically updates whenever you make changes in the dashboard.

Improved Collections Caching and API Performance

Finally, we've invested a lot of engineering cycles to further improve the caching strategy of our API for Collections. This is more technical, but ultimately, it means is that you're gonna have a much higher cache hit rate and blazing fast API calls when fetching Collection content; your apps will load even faster. We've been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work for scaling and performance and we think you're gonna love it. 

Please check these out and let us know your thoughts and feedback. Thank you for being a part of the Butter community!