Leap Week 02: Full Keynote

Speaker 0: Hello. Ben Haines, CEO and founder of Directus. It is actually 2024, and I originally started this software in 2004. So now 2 decades in, obviously, quite a bit has changed, and I think it's well overdue for us to go through and look at how we talk about Directus and how that has changed, over those those 2 decades. I'd like to do that through a quick 5 minute demo.

Obviously, a lot to cover in 5 minutes, but let's see, if we can make that happen. So we're starting off right here on the login screen. Here we're already logged in, so we're just gonna hit continue. But I think the first thing to notice, is that the entire platform is white label. Everything here is themeable from the border radii to the colors to this, subtle animation on the right.

But this is your login screen. Same thing for all these public pages. Of course, you'd have 2 factor authentication, SSO, anything else you might need here, for your your project. Let's go ahead and log in. Again, as a reminder, the way that Directus works is you point it at a database.

I like to start on this screen, because this is just a table in your database called metrics. Nothing more straightforward than that. Instead of seeing, you know, UNIX time stamps and, you know, just really complex data, we're seeing it in an intuitive way. This is a table layout. Many different ways you can look at your data, but here we're seeing conditional styling with icons, nice relative time stamps, and nice colors.

The full power of SQL is available here. We can of course do full text search, advanced filtering with logical grouping, everything you could do in SQL but in an in an intuitive no code way. Table views are pretty obvious. You can also come in and look at things through a media view. You could use a kanban view if you had, something where you're actually dragging things through some sort of process, and then keeping your your data organized like this.

Of course, if you have geospatial data in your database, we support that as well. So whether it's submarine cables or devices on a map, all of this is available. You can quickly zoom in, drill into an item, click, and then go in and start editing that that data. We also have, contacts or any other type of data, but I think where we'll drill into the actual form is on this blog. So if we click on one of these items, in this case, multi orchestration cultivate infrastructure, lots of different interfaces for how we edit the data.

You have time, daytime choosers. You have media selectors. You have this really great translation interface where you can actually go into a split view and manage multilingual content, etcetera. Every change that you make goes through our accountability system. So you can come over here and see all the revisions.

These are the changes that were made by who and when. You can actually roll back and undo those features. Really, really important for data governance. We also have a full commenting system with mentions, emoji, and everything you'd expect, and you can actually share things. You can create a unique URL and share that out to people outside of this, this platform.

So really powerful there as well. Moving on to a few of the other modules that we have. We have a user directory, which I'll pop into my user very quickly, just to showcase something that I think is pretty, pretty powerful. We can actually change the language to any of the 55 languages that we support and choose different themes, really tailoring it to the experience that I I need as a user. So as I come in, not only are we managing multilingual content, but the actual application can be translated as well.

So that's a really important feature. I'm gonna change that back, to English. That is the language that I understand, and we'll continue on. Really, really powerful access control here within the user directory and no limits in terms of how many roles, or or users you have. Once you come into our asset management system, you can actually we scrape all of the, metadata.

So I p t c, exif, all available, virtual folders, and you can, of course, come in here and do all of your edits and cropping. If you do that through the API, you actually have hundreds of different operations available. Insights, great for business intelligence, great for building out these different dashboards using aggregation, time series, anything that you can imagine. Very customizable. You just come in here, drag and drop these to whatever size you want.

Lots of options available for, how are you setting your precision, your ranges, etcetera, the colors. So put that into a full screen mode, throw it on a, a second display, and you've got a really great dashboard available instantly. Once we go into settings, this is where the ad administrators are working. You can, of course, build your data model here or you can build it through the API or just define it right in SQL and allow it to cascade out through everything. Then you can go through and start setting your access control as we talked about.

You know, you have managers. Based on the tables of your database, who can access what based on CRUD? Create, read, update, and delete. It's worth noting it's not just on and off, we have very granular rule based access control, within these different filters. Lots of other things to talk about including the theming and all these different options, all different extensions of our system.

The last thing I'd like to quickly show is our flows. This is automation. This is where you can come in and say I wanna deploy an application when x happens. Those triggers can be a cron job every 15 minutes or Monday at midnight. You can also have it when content changes.

Send out emails, to our different content authors for review. Lots of different operations you can choose from. And again, as with everything else in the system, it's all extensible and customizable. That's about as fast as we can run through the many, many features and capabilities of this platform. But for now, I'll hand it back over to Kevin.

Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Ben, and welcome to the second Leap Week. We have a fantastic week in store. We're going to start today with all of our announcements and then throughout the rest of the week we have loads of other events including socials, panels, and workshops for you to enjoy. One of the reasons people love Directus is because of its extensibility. You can augment and enhance most parts of Directus by using extensions, and then combine extensions in interesting ways to compose a data platform that really makes sense for your project.

We have app extensions like panels for directors insights, interfaces for the directors editor, layouts, and themes. We also have API and hybrid extensions like operations, endpoints, and hooks. Our community has built so many amazing extensions including the media AI bundle that lets you extract information from images in Directus files, computed interfaces that change the way that data is displayed after applying logic to them, and, of course, the Director's Copilot that lets you have contextual conversations about your data with an AI bot in order to unlock new insights. Agency partners use extensions like Pixsy Labs based in London. They built a blur hash extension which allows them to nicely load in very large images for an online art gallery.

And we have other customers use extensions for things like integrating with translation services, transforming videos, build automation, and more. Having this rich framework to build extensions is awesome. The missing bit has always been how to publish and reuse those extensions between projects. Today we are announcing something that I could not be more excited about, something which Directus users have been asking for for years. I'm gonna hand over to Rike to tell you more.

Speaker 2: This is the Directless marketplace. It is in beta for now for this first release, so we do really want your feedback to make it even better. The focus of this first iteration is really about discovery and installation. I'm gonna show you each of those here. So in settings, on the left hand sidebar, there's a new section for the marketplace.

In this marketplace, we have a listing of all of the extensions that we've been able to find on npm. These extensions contain every single type of extension that you know from before. So those are interfaces, modules, panels, teams, etc. When you install an extension, you'd find those in the same places where you'd find them normally. So for interfaces, you'd find it in data model, modules show up in the sidebar, themes, appearance, etcetera.

For any of those types, you can find them by, you know, current popularity, which ones were most recently published, or which ones are downloaded the most. In this case, let me go see if we can install a theme. So I'm gonna look up, you know, with the search, gonna find the theme that I'm looking for. For each individual extension, we're pulling in the readme file from your GitHub repo if it's connected, and we're pulling in the author and maintainers as provided by npm. Same goes for an author.

So in this particular case, because Kevin has his GitHub linked to his NPM, we can show, you know, the about information from his GitHub profile, together with an avatar, and all of the extensions that he has uploaded so far. To install the theme, I could just click the install button, and there it goes. So now that this theme is installed, I can find it under appearance like I'm with any other theme. There it is. And there we go.

To manage extensions you have installed, you can go to the extensions tab as you would for extensions before, where you can now both disable and uninstall them again. In the future, there's a couple of additional features that we know we want to add, starting with verified authors, verified packages, allowing, you know, the end user to know which one is gonna be trusted. But, also, we're looking to see if we can open up monetization in the marketplace. So this would allow you to sell extensions that you have built to others, in the ecosystem. That will be in the future release.

In the meantime, we absolutely hope you enjoy this. Please do leave all and every bit of feedback you have in the Discord channel marketplace beta.

Speaker 1: So the marketplace. Cool. Right? And the thing that excites me most is the marketplace is gonna be available in every Director's project. So whether you're self hosting or you're using Director's Cloud, you will now be able to install extensions via the marketplace.

Now, the marketplace is part of director version 10.10, but it isn't all. And we've had a few releases since the last week. So I wanted to kick it over to some of our engineers to tell you about the new and notable features that have shipped since the last Leap Week.

Speaker 3: In Directus 10.8, we released a powerful new theming engine. Previously, you were limited to adding your own CSS on top of the data studio to make yours. You now have the flexibility to customize colors, fonts, spacing, and much more across Directus using our new theme interface. Being able to white label Directus has always been important. Bringing your brand and aesthetic to the forefront really make Directus feel like your own tool.

Building on the excitement of our marketplace announcement, you can now develop and share themes as an extension. Now you can do more than just make direct us your own. You can share your designs and help others get creative too. We're excited to see the themes you bring to the marketplace. Thank you all for joining me in this exciting chapter.

Your vision, your directness, ready to dazzle. The canvas is fast. The palette is rich. And the possibilities, endless.

Speaker 4: As well as managing databases, Directus also helps you manage your files. As part of that, we offer media transformations via URL. Here's an image of 2 people on a beach. Notice that they're slightly off center. Which is fine, until you start to crop the image via your app.

Here the image is being cropped off from the center, but these two people are being chopped off. In Directus 10.9, we introduced focal points. You can now specify the point for Directus treat as the center. You can do this via the data studio or the files API. Now the subjects that matter in your images can always be visible.

You can combine this with our automation features to determine what the point of interest should be. We hope you enjoy working with focal points, a small change with big impact.

Speaker 5: Before, when requesting content versions, this is the data structure, the data API return. And with relational fields, note that there is a create, update, delete array for each item. This is correct. It is what will happen when this version gets promoted. But it's different to what you may expect from an item when not using content version or using the main version.

This does made it hard to implement live preview as you had to account for 2 different data structures. In directors 10.10, we will store this data structure. But when you request a content version, we will standardize the data structure before returning it. So the return data is now the outcome if you were to promote the item. Here, we have an example of both a one to many and the many to many relationship.

In the one to many comments example, we are both updating an item and deleting related comments. The new output doesn't contain the deleted comment and returns the full item including any changes made in the content version. Likewise, in the many to many page blocks example, a block is being created and another deleted. The return data from a content version is now the same structure you expect including the outcome of any changes. Now you can implement live preview with a standard and predictable data structure.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much for that rundown, and we hope you enjoy using theming, focal points, and our enhancements to content versioning. And, of course, this is just a tiny sliver of the features which we have included in our recent releases. But for today, there's plenty more announcements to

Speaker 4: come.

Speaker 6: Let's rock and roll.

Speaker 1: Let's get started with Directus and Nuxt.

Speaker 4: You don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. You hire smart people to figure out your problems.

Speaker 6: Can you build Netflix in an hour?

Speaker 1: Not terribly elegant, but we're just gonna throw a new error.

Speaker 0: Because even pirates, sometimes they're they're not pirating the way you want

Speaker 2: a pirate. Keep it simple. Won't be complicated.

Speaker 4: Hey. I enjoy what I do.

Speaker 1: I've got my pen now. I'm serious.

Speaker 6: We're gonna be cutting this one really, really close.

Speaker 1: Let's talk about Directus TV. It's a new streaming platform that we released at the end of last year with hours of content for you to enjoy and I wanna tell you about some of our series. In a 100 apps in a 100 hours, Bryant takes a common application idea and tries to build it in just 60 minutes. Sometimes he succeeds, sometimes he doesn't, and honestly it's a bit of a stressful watch but it's always a lot of fun. In Trace Talks, John and Pedro interview engineering leaders about their journeys.

It's full of interesting insights and anecdotes for all stages of your career. And in quick connect, we show you how to integrate with third party platforms to build some interesting and useful automations. Today we're announcing some new shows that are going to land on your screen this spring. In what's in your doc, we discovered the toolkit behind really productive people. I don't know about you but whenever someone shares their screen I always look at all of the apps they're running in the hope that I can find something new that will somehow enrich my life.

So, we've invited 5 guests to ask them about the software, hardware, and analog tools that they use to run their lives. I had a blast recording it and I know you're gonna have a blast watching it. In the joy of theming, we invite Bry Ross who is definitely not just Bryon in a wig to highlight the power behind the director's theming engine by creating nice new themes that pay homage to brands you know and love. There are only happy little accidents in this series and they're lovely lovely peaceful episodes. Battlesnake is a popular competitive game where your code is the controller and in Ready Set Battlesnake Andrew joins me to build a snake inside of Directus.

Honestly, we can't believe it worked not only that it worked but it worked as well as it did, join us to find out how. With great power can come great complexity. In short hops, we share quick tips and tricks to help you get the most from directors. And the best bit is this series is based directly on community feedback. Today we're also announcing some show renewals so you can look forward to new episodes of both the 100 Apps in a 100 Hours and Dev Thoughts.

Now many of you have also been asking about how directors TV is actually put together. So today we're also releasing in full a new series called Digging the Rabbit Hole where we're going to cover everything Directus TV from the conception and inspiration behind the platform, the technical setup, the life cycle of a show from pitch through to release, and some of the early feedback. We hope you enjoy all of these new shows that are landing this spring, and, of course, you can watch digging the rabbit hole in full today. Directors TV really is a community project. We're building shows for you to enjoy, taking in your feedback, and then deciding what new shows we can create or shows we can renew based on that feedback.

Well, our community does so much more, and I wanna hand over to Jonathan to talk more about it.

Speaker 7: Hey, everyone. The Directus community is the foundation, DNA, essence, source of strength, the font of magic, you might say, that makes up our team and makes us excited to come to work every day. We're so thrilled to have such a great community. I get the opportunity to interact with the community on a daily basis and that community interaction. I learned something new each time, and that includes anything from a feature request to a support ticket, to presales activities, talking to new clients, people that have used direct us for years to people that are brand new to the direct us.

And I get that opportunity to interact with everyone, on a daily basis. And it is it it literally makes me excited to come to work every day. We do some other community actions and activities that we do our request reviews. We do those every 2 weeks. You get an opportunity to see our processes, how we go through feature requests, and we get that our we get that live interaction with community members.

Hope to see you there. It's very, very fun and exciting to see that. And then from that explosion of ideas, we narrow that back down to what is possible. Some other things we do some in person activities these days. We'd still do some live interactions for Lynn, London, New York.

There's a variety of others. You can find those out on the website and see that. And with that, I get to tell you about that newest hackathon. I'm so excited. The hackathons have brought new use cases, new capabilities to exist to the previous hackathons.

We've seen and learned some really cool things about what people the concepts and ideas that someone might come up with. And so this particular hackathon is gonna be focused around one of our biggest, up boats kind of in the community is around payments. So we'd like to see the directest payments hackathon. We'd like to see you build and publish in the new marketplace. I'm so excited about the marketplace.

Think through the scenarios and the use cases. You know, how would I deliver coupons? How would I deliver trials? What happens when payments fail? What happens when deployments fail or some issue happens during that process?

Make sure you've got handling logic around those kinds of things. Include reporting include any, extensions or, data details that are valuable that you find in your day to day interactions, with payment platforms and how you want that to operate. You'll have until the end of March to submit that you'll find all of the details around prizes and information about how and when and what to submit, on directus. Io/hackathons, and you'll find links throughout the the documentation and things that we'll share through the coming days. With that said, I get the opportunity to hand off to mister Matt Miner to talk more about our community.

Cheers.

Speaker 8: Hey. How's it going? I'm Matt on the marketing team here at Directus. Data discussions really aren't the stuff of legend. In fact, when we put this survey together, at first, there was a couple, like, raised eyebrows, like, data, really?

Is that what we wanna do? What do you know? A month later, we had a huge flood of responses. 782 developers told us how they're using data in their projects. That tells us that, you know, data isn't dull.

There's just nobody talking about it in the right way. We're gonna make data exciting again. Here are the 6 things that we learned that we thought were really interesting, or 2 of these actually really shocked us when we found out. Number 1 is that Postgres leads the pack. It is the choice of over 63% of the developers we surveyed, that they're using in their projects currently.

The number 2 thing, slightly related, but of all the database types when developers are starting new projects, over 57% of them said that they prefer relational databases all over over all other types. Even asked our CTO, Wrike, about it. And he said, you know, the most likely reason is that a vast majority of data applications have some sort of schema consistency need for type safety and expectability. In NoSQL, you can quickly end up effectively reimplementing a lot of things that a SQL database already offers out of the box. The number 3 thing we found that was really interesting to us was that developers are leaning towards Cloud Hosted Database Solutions.

So by a wide margin too. Cloud leads, 68% of respondents prefer hosting with solutions like AWS or Azure, versus, you know, managed database services like DigitalOcean or on prem servers. This one, I think, was so shocking because it was so lopsided. 94% of our survey respondents said they prefer working with REST APIs as opposed to GraphQL. We kind of went into this thinking that cost was gonna be the primary factor, to consider when hosting databases.

And in fact, it is a consideration, but it's not the most important. I think what this tells us is that developers are prioritizing performance and reliability and ease of use over how much it costs, which is still a consideration, but not what's driving, decisions at the end of the day. Taking this a step further, actually, we asked what the primary factors they think hosting should be charging for. And the top 3 in order were, machine resource utilization, so like RAM and CPU, storage space, and actually number of read and write options, which was interesting. The least popular way to price hosting, was by charging on the number of database records.

So just an interesting little finding there. But, yeah. Number 6 was the most shocking thing we found. Over 64% of respondents said that they're using AI for cogeneration. So despite all of this, like loud people in the room talking about, like, AI is bad for development, I think there's a lot of people quietly actually using this to become better at their job and learning how to implement and the things that they're doing.

Actually, going a little bit deeper on this, we asked 2 questions. If AI was too risky for data analysis to influence decision making, on average, sentiment was neutral. But when it comes to using AI to actually interact with the database with, like, CRUD permissions, overwhelming sentiment was, like, please do not do that. That is way too risky, which makes sense. So those are the 6 big takeaways, learnings we add just from a surface evaluation of the results that we got for in the survey.

Hopefully, these were interesting to you as they were to us. And again, like, data isn't boring. It's just how are people using it? How are we framing it? Hopefully, we can get some more discussions around this, because we're data nerds at the end of the day.

And what we're gonna do is basically put together a series that we call Data Drops, where we're gonna release an article, with, like, a really interesting insight. Because it's one thing to know what the trends are, but we think it's more important to understand, like, why they vary from a startup in Silicon Valley as opposed to a seasoned freelancer in Berlin. So if you wanna get up to date on those and get nice little nuggets in your inbox, make sure you sign up for a newsletter. It goes out once a month. You can sign up in our docs.

You can sign up on our, main blog. But we'd love to have you sign up and just get these once a month newsletters. Appreciate the time today, and, have a good one.

Speaker 1: We hope you're enjoying today's announcement so far. They've included the release of Directus 10.10 with the Directus Marketplace beta and improvements to content versioning, our new shows on Directus TV, and, of course, our new hackathon. But we're not quite done yet. I want to kick it over to our director of engineering, Alex, to talk about what's

Speaker 9: new for Directus Cloud. Directus really is a solution for everyone. From side projects and small businesses right through to huge organization like Kia, Copa Airlines, Walmart, and T Mobile. Our Enterprise Cloud offers dedicated infrastructure from the team who build directors. It's perfect for mission critical project with higher security and support needs.

Today, we are proud to be expanding the Enterprise Cloud offering with key features requested by our customers. Over the last few months, our team has been working on improving our infrastructure in a number of areas including security, performances, and flexibility. With this in mind, we are not able to offer auto scaling infrastructure, which means even with sudden peak in traffic, your georectus project stays strong. Auto scaling is enabled by default on all our new projects, both on Enterprise and Professional Cloud. We love speaking to our customers, but you should also need to speak to us less.

Up until now, if you want to set up a custom domain for an enterprise project, you have to get in touch with us. Now it's over. Self-service custom domains are now available through the Cloud Dashboard for Enterprise Cloud Projects. We are looking forward to chatting with you more, but not about Guest of the Vans. We have more announcements to come.

Over to Colton for now.

Speaker 10: Today, we're announcing our new partner program focused on agencies. Agency partners are a super important part of how we reach our customers. We've designed this program in conjunction with our current partners, and the program will enable agencies and client projects of all shapes and sizes, and we think you're gonna love it. We now have a formal certification program to help you get the most from Directus and understand which projects it is suitable for. And, of course, there will also be a larger resource center available which can help you in discussing direct us with your customers.

Our team is available for advisory calls to validate your approaches, suggest new ones, and sell alongside your team. And of course, the program includes revenue sharing both upfront and renewals. The new partner directory will help companies looking for experts to implement their projects. And with co marketing opportunities, we can help share all your stories. This isn't all, but it captures the most important parts of the partner program.

We really think you're gonna love it. You can find out more at directus. Io / partners. And later this year, we'll also be expanding our program to include technical partners, but that's for another day. Back to you, Kevin.

Speaker 1: It's been a wonderful day. And on behalf of the whole Director's core team, thank you so much for tuning in, whether live or on demand on Director's TV. Now before we head off, we have one more thing to announce. Bryant?

Speaker 6: While headless CMS is one of our most popular use cases, Directus is a super powerful toolkit for managing any type of data. A lot of our most successful clients start out with a single use case, like headless CMS. And then once they realize the full potential of Directus, they quickly expand into other applications. But what if you could unlock that potential even faster? Who wouldn't like to ship new projects and features in half the normal amount of time?

What developer doesn't love to make a huge impact for their clients, their team, their organization. That's what my team has been working to solve, and I'm super excited to introduce Directus Plus. Directus plus is a companion subscription for developers who love to ship. Doesn't matter if you're a freelancer, agency developer, or a staff engineer. You'll get a ton of value from Directus plus Here's what's inside.

Powerful headless starter kits to help you ship faster. Starter Kits are done for you back ends for specific use cases you'll inevitably be asked to build or buy. Like learning management systems for your own custom courseware, product information management to manage your product catalogs and technical data, multi tenant SaaS, video streaming platforms like Directus TV, and more. These starter kits get you to 80% complete on day 1, saving you boatloads of time. And they're headless, so you get to bring your favorite front end framework.

They're also designed to be fully composable, so you can use them together in the same project. That's not all. Directus Plus also includes advanced training and workshops to level up your skills. We'll be hosting deep dive workshops that are exclusively for Directus Plus members. Workshops will be taught by our own internal Directus experts, and, occasionally, we'll even be joined by our partners, hosting providers, front end framework experts, and more.

You'll learn tons about how to leverage advanced features inside Directus, like flows, insights, and more to build real world use cases. For example, one of our first workshops is on connecting Directus with Stripe to accept payments. Directus plus members will receive a premium role and private channels within our Discord community and first dibs on cool new swag drops. As a launch thank you, we're offering $100 off the price for Directus Plus membership. So if you sign up now, you'll pay just $99 per year.

Yep. That's it. You'll get starter kits to move faster, training to level up, and the pride that comes with supporting our project. To learn more and get started, go to directus.ioplus. Just fill out the short checkout form and you'll receive a private invite and instructions within moments.

I can't wait to see you on the other side.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for that, Bryant. Today, we've covered so much. So let me provide a quick recap. We announced Directus 10.10 and this new phase of Directus that we're ushering in with the release of the Directus Marketplace beta. The spring slate of shows for Directus TV, the new payments hackathon, custom domains and auto scaling for Directus Cloud, a refreshed partner program, and, of course, Directus Plus.

Now while the announcement portion of Leap Week is now completed, there is still so much more going on this week. So head over to our website to learn more about all the other events taking place. On behalf of the whole directors team, once again, thank you so much for being a part of this. And whether it is at one of our Leap Week events, whether it's at one of our in person user groups, or over in our Discord server, we'll see you around.