CrafterCMS Product and Roadmap Update Spring 2024

We recap a talk from CrafterCMS Live! 2024 where Russ Danner, CrafterCMS VP of Products and Customer Success, highlighted some of the latest and upcoming features of the headless CrafterCMS platform. 

Watch Now: CrafterCMS Roadmap Update | CrafterCMS Live! 2024

Content Authoring Experience

Across the digital experience industry, headless CMSs don’t have the best reputation for content editing. This is by design, as the API-driven approach that headless CMSs offer means that they aren’t visual by nature, which can be clunky for authors who are accustomed to the traditional editing and publishing experience of web CMSs. 

At CrafterCMS, we believe content editing should be easy, visual, and highly productive. To accomplish this, we provide high-quality features and also cater to enterprise-grade concerns. 

Enterprise Grade Concerns 

• Different delivery channels and tech: Support for multiple channels and technologies is important due to different use cases across companies and departments and the need to change technology over time.
• Structured, reusable and searchable content: Structured content is essential to support reusability, SEO and the emergence of AI.
• Clean separation between code and content: Without clean separation, it’s impossible to reuse content across different channels.

Best In Class Features

In order to meet enterprise requirements, CrafterCMS’s content authoring experience includes several world-class features:

• True technology-agnostic in-context editing: Edit content in different styles and for multiple use cases with a user-friendly interface that enables authors to edit text, drag-and-drop images, video, and more. 
• Design assist editing adjustments: Adjust design elements and turn off editing mode to place elements exactly where they need to go without crowding the interface. 
• Searchable asset libraries: Search by keyword to quickly find assets.
• Intelligent drag-and-drop support: CrafterCMS allows authors to define content rules so that it understands where components belong and where they don’t.

Other features include a new authoring search, new dashboards, and support for dark mode.

What’s Next?

• New content modeling and form engine: Efficient content modeling for easier content reuse and a React-based form engine to create new forms and experiences. 
• Recycle bin: Improved content deletion and reversion with the same workflow benefits of content creation and editing operations. 
• Bulk operation tools and APIs: Improved support within the Crafter Studio UI. 

Composable Architecture

CrafterCMS is a headless content management system that serves as the content platform for a digital experience platform (DXP). However, a DXP is more than a CMS, with components including search, DAM, SEO, and personalization. CrafterCMS provides robust search and personalization features and other common DXP capabilities right out of the box. It also has a composable architecture and specialized capabilities via the CrafterCMS Marketplace. 

But it’s more than just plugins and a Marketplace. A composable architecture should also provide:

• Integration fundamentals via APIs, hooks, events, and SDKs
• Self-contained but interoperable services and components that can interact with other packaged capabilities. 
• Discrete packaging and discoverability

CrafterCMS offers numerous plugins to integrate with authoring, including Advanced Workflow with Trello, Bulk Edit, and Yoast SEO integration. Plugins are also available for content delivery, including those for Hubspot and Chatbots. 

What’s Next?

• More plugins: For enterprise use cases and also more custom plugins from CrafterCMS users.
• Install individual plugins from a remote Git repo.
• Continue to improve API and event support: To enable users to build robust, integrated experiences with our existing capabilities.

AI for Content Authors

CrafterCMS offers generative AI capabilities, includinga  ChatGPT-assisted content authoring plugin to help with creating descriptive content, making suggestions, and more. CrafterCMS also supports AI-enabled workloads using AWS Rekognition. 

What’s Next?

• Support for new content and media types
• AI-assisted content creation: Premium articles and blogs
• Custom LLM integration: To support contextualized prompts

DevContentOps

Building a truly engaging digital experience takes more than just content authors. It takes a collaborative team including developers, operations professionals (DevOps) and authors -- working across multiple environments. 

However, DevOps by itself, while crucial, does not fully address enterprise needs when it comes to creating and optimizing modern, content-centric digital experiences. Content plays an essential role in crafting memorable digital experiences, necessitating the inclusion of content teams, tools, and processes in the strategic conversation. 

CrafterCMS uses Git as the content repository backbone to support DevContentOps and help connect multiple environments, personnel, and the CMS to enable frictionless collaboration among software developers, content creators, and IT operations.

What’s Next?

• DevContentOps KPI reporting
• Improved Git integration: Improved mechanics, performance improvements, UI features (history/Gitlog)

Security and Reliability

CrafterCMS already addresses security at several important levels. 

• Architecture: From how we separate the content authoring and content delivery systems to add extra layers of security to the overall system (not to mention higher performance, cost efficiencies, easier scalability and more).
• Policies & Processes: Continuously working to meet security standards and policies such as SOC2. 
• Dependencies: A supply chain of libraries and dependencies. 
• Testing: Daily security scans and testing

What’s Next?

• Java 21: Extending long-term support for Java and introducing new performance improvements, language support, and security and vulnerability mitigation.
• Spring 6: Extending long-term support for Spring and providing performance benefits
• Improving the upgrade process
• Trust Center: Where customers can access important security artifacts (SOC2 reports, scan reports), software bills of materials, compliance documents, policies, and process documentation.

To learn more about upcoming updates and get a walkthrough of some of these features, view the talk: CrafterCMS Product and Roadmap Update.