Leap Week 3: Full Keynote

Speaker 0: Welcome to my office and to Leap week 3. It's already been 3 months since the last one, and we've put together what we hope you'll find to be a very enjoyable week of events. This kickoff is split into 3 sections, Directus Open Source, Content and Community, and finally, What's New for Partners and Customers. Just after this broadcast at 11 AM Eastern, we're inviting you to talk about our announcements in an event in our Discord community server. Tomorrow, there's an event all about how agencies source and assess technologies, moderated by our CEO, Ben Haines, with guests from and Work and Co.

Tomorrow, there's also an exclusive workshop for Directors Plus members, where you'll build a global search module that will search across all collections in your project. On Wednesday, we're partnering with our friends at Twilio for a hands on workshop on building an outbound phone system in Directus Insights. On Wednesday, there's also a live episode of a 100 apps in a 100 hours, where we challenge Brian to try and build a project in just 60 minutes. He'll be joined by some of our colleagues and friends who will either make things easier or much, much harder. On Thursday, we're running another workshop with voice AI company Deepgram, where we'll build new automations within Directus to create audio summaries of YouTube videos.

And finally, on Friday, we invite all of you to a community networking social. You can find all of the events listed on our event page, on our Discord events tab, and in your calendar if you have a Leap Week ticket. Just over a year ago, we released Directus 10, a really important moment for us in creating premium and sustainable open source software. Internally, we ran what we called the summer of Directus 10, where we could renew our focus in rapidly bringing out new features for everyone, including live preview, real time, a new SDK, and a lot more. In a landscape where lots of companies have changed their license unexpectedly, we invited you, our community and users, to help figure out the right steps to take.

And we've recently published how that change has gone so far. Today, we're not announcing Directus 10.13, but instead the release candidate of the next major version of Directus, Directus 11. To talk to you more about what's new, I want to hand over to our co founder, CTO, and lead maintainer, Ryke.

Speaker 1: I'm excited to announce today how we're overhauling access control in Directus. We spent the last months researching and developing the next big iteration of permissions that we're calling policies. Policies allow you to compose the access control for your roles and users. Each role and user can have 1 or more policies, which can be reused across the system. Indirect is 10.

Permissions are directly attached to roles. This means that you may have many similar roles with duplicated permissions to achieve the granularity that your project requires. Before, the user could only have one set of permissions based on their role. A policy, however, is a set of permissions that, like today, allow you to control what a user can see or do across your collections. Policies are effectively an abstraction, allowing for 1 or more permissions to be reused across roles or users.

You will be able to add policies directly to a role, a user, or both. For example, when managing a website, you could create a page edit policy that contains all the permissions required to be able to edit the website's pages, which you can then attach to your marketing and engineering roles. Or for example, when generating sales reports, you could create a view quarterly results policy that allows your analysts, account executives, and demand team to view the quarterly results. The user or role can have multiple of these policies so each policy can be very granular as opposed to having one role that has to contain everything. Much easier to manage.

Another example, when configuring a multi tenant system, you can now create a role per tenant but have all of the permissions for those roles rely on the same shared policies, allowing you to manage the permissions for each user in a centralized place while keeping the tenants separated by role. Policies allow for new ways of organizing and managing your permission sets. We'll be providing these examples and more in our new docs platform coming later this summer. All these changes might sound like a lot at first, but rest assured, as with the releases of Directus 10, we're providing an automatic migration between Directus 10 and Directus 11 to help you get started with policies. We're very excited to give you this new flexibility which is perfect for simplifying your more complicated projects.

Come chat with us about this and more at 11 AM EST in our town hall in Discord.

Speaker 0: Being such an important and major change to how permissions and access control works in Directus, we've decided to first publish a release candidate version of directors 11 to get it into your hands and crush any last remaining bugs that may remain before general availability. The directors 11 release candidate will be available this week with a general availability in a few weeks' time. Now since the last sleep week, we've also released a feature that's been requested for ages. Over to Daniel to tell you more.

Speaker 2: In Directus 10.11, we introduced public user registration. This allows for users to register new accounts directly from the login screen or via the API. Let me show you how it works. Once enabled in your project settings, users will see a link on the sign in screen. They click it, register, and can immediately log in.

You can also enable email verification, which will send the user an email with a link they need to click on. Until they do, the user account will be marked as unverified and they won't be able to log in. You can also set up rules that the email address must match. This is more powerful than just enabling email allow listing as you can set more complex rules based on your needs. And then in Directus 10.12, we applied feedback about this feature and created a set of environment variables to control how many users can exist in your project.

Before now, you had to use a series of perfectly configured settings to enable public registration in a separate application or custom extensions. We're always looking to apply your feedback to Directus. We hope this feature makes your development easier.

Speaker 0: Up until now, we've only supported the very latest version of Directus. But we've heard that this can be difficult for users, needing to sometimes adapt your project to meet the needs of later versions when perhaps all you need is security updates. So Directus 10.12 will be the first version of Directus to receive extended security updates. We want you to think of this as providing an upgrade window to update and take advantage of latest features while being able to keep your project secure in the meantime. Directus 10.12 will receive extended security updates until the end of 2024.

Now we've been releasing more than just the Director's core project in the last few months, and I want to hand over to Pedro to tell you more.

Speaker 3: Those of you who are eagle eyed may have noticed a start to publish packages under the Directus Labs name. Directus Labs is our space to build experiments and gather feedback. Now not everything that's published by Directus Labs will be maintained the same way as the core project, but it does give us room to try out new things and respond to our users. In fact, last month's Directus AI announcement was a project launched inside of Directus Labs. So in case you missed it, Directus AI is a set of extensions that you can install from the marketplace and leverage best in class AI platforms directly within Directus.

So whether you're looking to rewrite text, generate images, run text analysis, or or moderation, these building blocks can be built into your workflows with Directus Automate. You can find out more about Directus AI by checking out our Directus TV series going through each of these extensions in more detail. And today, we're announcing new Directus Labs project, which closes out one of our most requested features and one that I've been waiting for for a long time, a spreadsheet layout. So now you can edit items directly from within Directus Explore, either automatically saving after each edit or manually saving after you've made all the changes. This may sound small, but it's gonna be a huge change for teams that need to edit data often.

This isn't the only new extension we published through DXIS Labs, but it's certainly one of the most impactful. We specifically wanna shout out our community member, Florian, for working with us on this project. Directus Labs allows us to ship new integrations, interfaces, and automations really quickly and embrace Directus as a super extensible platform ready for your projects. Talking about extensions, I wanna hand it over to Benny to tell you more.

Speaker 4: Good day, everyone. I'm Benny, and I have the privilege of talking about our plans for the extensions and marketplace ecosystem. I recently joined the team with the goal of focusing on the developer and user experiences of Directus Extensions. This includes the overall extension development and deployment lifecycle, a public facing marketplace, and the underlying registry API. Many of you have been wondering what will come next for the marketplace since our release of the beta at our last Leap Week.

Let me start by thanking each of you who have contributed to testing and providing feedback on the marketplace in any way. Let's discuss the developer experience first. One of the key parts of improving the developer experience, and also partly the discoverability of extensions, is in bringing new capabilities to the extensions sandbox SDK. SDK. With the upcoming release of our new policy system, we are expecting to be able to provide granular access to things like the underlying file systems, users, notifications, and emails.

One of the biggest opportunities for improving the sandbox that we have identified is of course enabling support for importing external libraries. Even though this may be a significant technical challenge to implement whilst retaining the important security benefits of having a sandbox, we are looking forward to solving this for you. Okay, so what about new extension features? We are exploring how to augment existing extensions, how to deploy data and config templates using the same APIs as extensions, how to add functionality to allow developers to define extension specific settings, and we are looking at increasing the amount of life cycle events available to extension developers. We are frequently asked how to add new plugins to the built in block editor for example, as well as adding tweaks to other extensions and experiences.

Right now this is cumbersome, and we think that extensions will benefit from being able to install lightweight enhancements. This means extension developers will be able to package the core functionality for their custom developed user experiences, whilst being able to allow others to build on their work. Being able to deploy templates and config via extension system will allow users to include things like data structures and email templates in a controlled way. Extension settings being configurable in the app will allow the inclusion of API keys and other configuration that isn't dependent on having access to environment variables at deploy time. Our life cycle hooks will allow for better management of installing and uninstalling extensions.

These are just some of the features we are planning to add to the road map soon to help craft our growing extension library. The last set of work we will be focusing on before moving the marketplace out of beta will ensure your extensions are seen by the widest audience possible. Our marketplace listings will be more dynamic and easier to find what you are looking for. This will include providing more options for meta information to control elements such as how details about individual contributors are displayed, as well as adding elements like hero screenshots and logos. This may also include enhancements to the configurable meta information like better tagging options to improve searching for extensions.

To help increase visibility, we are looking at how to make extensions listed in the marketplace discoverable outside of the director's studio so that anyone can link to them for consideration outside of an existing project. We also want to provide extension authors with insights into how their extensions are performing. This may include being able to do things like react to comments, reviews, and feedback from users as a verified extension author. Finally, we are looking at how to indicate the quality of each of the extensions public in the marketplace in a clear and transparent way. This will help users get the best experience and provide developers clear guidelines on how to produce high quality extensions.

These new changes will be implemented in both the data studio as well as the registry API. Once these changes are implemented, we will publish the registry API spec to enable developers to publish and maintain their own additional registries. As you have heard, there is a lot going into the marketplace. We are looking forward to sharing the roadmap with you in the next couple of weeks, and you'll be able to see the priority of item stem. We wanted to take this opportunity to provide some insight into how the roadmap is being developed and what will be coming.

Once this work is done, the marketplace will be ready for general availability. We hope you are as excited as we are for some of these upcoming changes. We are really passionate about the directors extension ecosystem, and I can't wait to see what you create.

Speaker 0: No. Hang on. We gotta go back. We gotta do that one again. Sorry.

Speaker 5: Hello, everybody. Now let's dive into our theme. So for this, I'm gonna pull out my trusty palette knife. This is not gonna be good for my lisp, but we're gonna try it anyways.

Speaker 6: It's just a really great tool and I've just been really enjoying still using tyform all these years later.

Speaker 0: So let's give that just a moment, and there are the maple trees again.

Speaker 7: I like this because every time I put it on, it reminds me that some tech is just rubbish.

Speaker 0: Not terribly elegant, but we're just gonna throw a new error.

Speaker 5: Hop open my inbox. Boom. There we can see the message. Let's take a look at our logs. We have got some logs in here.

Holy moly. I guess this is gonna be all sorts of copyright infringement here. I wanna see your facial expressions because I wanna know if this is a terrible idea. This is for entertainment purposes only. Any lawyers watching this, just so we know.

Speaker 8: The creative code for design and development depending on which alliteration you choose.

Speaker 9: Keyboards are probably the main one that I could talk about where I have a bunch of custom mechanical keyboards. I have some behind me. I've got a bunch all over the place.

Speaker 0: Let's get started with Directus and Astro.

Speaker 2: Welcome to another exciting episode of, Request Review, where we go over your hopes, wishes, and dreams and potentially crush them.

Speaker 0: This was a huge amount of fun. It was just a little quick project which I think is gonna actually enrich my day to day life.

Speaker 5: Oh, hey. It's visit from the cat. I was hoping he'd show up.

Speaker 6: No. It's okay. Christopher.

Speaker 5: What does it all mean?

Speaker 6: Thanks for joining me and, I'll see you

Speaker 8: somewhere.

Speaker 0: No. No. No. If you're if you're okay with it. I love that as the

Speaker 9: Alright. Fine.

Speaker 0: Next, Directus TV. If you've not heard of it, it's our streaming platform which brings together education, entertainment, and stories from across the director's ecosystem. Every week we publish new episodes across our 30 shows. Since the last leap week, we've released buzzword wilderness, which has Matt asking if it's real or just marketing. Democratizing data where we bring new life to open datasets with directors and new seasons of both Trace Talks and a 100 apps in a 100 hours.

Today we are announcing some new shows. In t I l, that's technically I'm lost, Matt dives deep into the world of code. Along the way he shares his discoveries, successes and occasional missteps making tech more accessible to nontechnical professionals. In authentication avenue, we travel down the world of all things authentication, authorization, and access control. Director's auth is hugely powerful and we're excited to help you better understand it.

In dungeons and dashboards, we will build tools for our fellow dungeon masters, guides, and navigators, and build the ultimate toolkit for running campaigns with our parties.

Speaker 9: And I'll be your host in Talking Heads, Coding Hands. It's a developer game show bringing together elements from other great games you may know.

Speaker 7: Join our contestants as they talk and code against the clock.

Speaker 0: Thanks for that, Cassidy. There are even more shows hitting your screen this summer, so you can get truly lost down the rabbit hole. Now everything we do is for our community, so I'm going to pass over to Beth, the newest member of our developer relations team, for the next announcement.

Speaker 6: Directors is a project that has only been successful thanks to our vibrant community. We have 12500 members in our Discord server, where community members help each other better understand and build with Directus, show off what they have built and collaborate. We have 100 of GitHub contributors and tens of thousands of GitHub stars. All of this has helped shape Directus and we are super thankful for the love and care the community give. We are often asked how people can contribute to the project beyond just code.

So today, we are announcing the Directus Community Experts Programme. This programme supports you in bringing Directus to your own communities and networks across the world. At launch, this will be a program focused on events, both bringing Directors to events named you and running new events with our support. We've designed this program to make sure there is loads for you to get out of it and of course if writing is more your thing our guest author program remains open for submission. Register interest in joining the Community Experts program at directors.

Iscommunityexperts by the end of June, where we'll be reviewing and sending more information across.

Speaker 0: Thank you so much for that, Beth, and I'm super excited to be putting together the Directus community experts program. Now moving on, our agency partners are a really important part of how we reach customers and make sure their projects are successful. And at the last Leap Week, Colton announced our revamp partner program. Since then, more has happened, so I want to hand over to him to tell you more.

Speaker 8: It's been an exciting past few months since we announced our new partner program. The feedback from the community and agency partners has been amazing. You can find direct us partners in over 35 countries to help build your projects. No matter where you're located, we have great partners like Sunzanet based in Germany, HarmonyX based in Thailand, Rockulab based in Australia, untile based in Portugal, and Echobind based in the USA. All of these agencies are experts in consulting, developing, and supporting your projects.

We can't wait to introduce you to our full list of agency partners through the new partner directory and also showcase them through agency corner, a new show launching on Directus TV this July. Alongside the partner directory and agency corner, our certification path for new partners is dropping with the latest educational material, including our newly announced policies feature. Tomorrow is a live bridging bytes event on how agencies assess and buy technologies. Our CEO Ben is hosting with guests from and work and co. You're now going to hear from Bryant for our final set of announcements today.

Speaker 5: It's been 3 months since we released Directus Plus, our premium companion subscription for developers building with Directus. The subscription includes access to powerful starter kits designed to help you ship projects faster, and advanced workshops that are exclusive to members. So far, we've got over 100 plus individual developers and agencies in the Directus Plus program. And we've gotten a ton of great feedback. But before I share some exciting new updates, first, let's run through all the things we've shipped to date.

We've released a total of 7 starter kits for a lot of different use cases. A learning management system to build custom courseware. A PIM system to manage all of your product data and catalogs. A multi tenant SaaS application backend. A video streaming platform, similar to Directus TV.

A status page to keep users informed of any incidents or downtime. An onboarding checklist application that is perfect for managing new employees or even new clients. And our most recent starter kit, an AI content machine that works with our Directus AI extensions to absolutely crush your content workflow. Generate ideas from notes and recordings. Create first drafts with a click of a button, and automatically translate content to multiple languages.

We've also completed 2 workshops. In Minimum Viable Billing, we used Directus Flows to accept payments for online products via Stripe. In database to data engine, we gave a sad lonely SQL database, new purpose, and equipped our non technical team members with rest APIs, dashboards and automated workflows. Now, I'm sure Kev is saying, okay, enough of the past, Brian. Tell them what's coming up.

So let's hop into the updates. Our next starter kit drops this week. It's a virtual event registration platform, inspired by our own Leap Week site. You can now stop stringing together 30 different services to run online events for your company, or for your clients. It's also the 1st Starter Kit to include a front end that already has all the plumbing connected to the Directus Backend, enabling you to ship even faster.

It includes registration and ticketing, personalized social images, a referral tracking system, and more. I'm also excited to announce a new Directus plus team plan. We heard your feedback. And for Teams, you wanted an easier way to share the value that Directus Plus offers. Starter kits, training, and access to the private community channels.

Pricing for the Team Plan will be 5.99 per year, which includes up to 20 developers. That's a huge savings over the individual plan. The team plan will be rolling out over the next couple weeks, so stay tuned to your inbox. Lastly, the introductory period and the promotional pricing of $99 for the year will be available for just 2 more weeks. On July 1st, the cost of an individual plan for Directus Plus will go up to 2.99 annually.

As we've built and released more starter kits, and firmed up the offering, this felt like the right moment to launch Directus Plus more fully. And with that, back to

Speaker 0: you, Kip. Today, we announced Directus 11 with policies, a concept that builds a new level of flexibility into your access control, along with a 6 month upgrade window in which Directus 10.12 will receive security updates. Pedro introduced Directus Labs and our new spreadsheet layout, and Benny talked you through our plans for extensions development and the Directus Marketplace. We teased what's new on director's TV this summer, with great new shows like Technically Unlost, Dungeons and Dashboards and Talking Heads Coding Hands, hosted by Cassidy Williams. Beth revealed direct to Community Experts, a new program to involve and reward community members who go above and beyond for each other.

Colton shared more about our partner program, and Brian showed off what's new for Directus Plus. And it's only Monday. Join us after this at 11 AM Eastern for a community town hall, where you can come and talk to the core team about today's announcements. Tomorrow is Bridging Bites, and an exclusive workshop for Directors Plus. It's not too late to sign up and join in.

On Wednesday, we're running a workshop on integrating Twilio with Directus and our second ever a 100 apps in a 100 hours live. On Thursday, we'll be building complex automations with Deepgram's voice AI tools. And finally, on Friday, we invite all of you to our community networking social. Thank you again on behalf of the directors core team, which now accounts for over 30 of us over 10 countries. Your enthusiasm and support is what keeps us focused on building the best back end for your projects.

Until next time. Bye for now.