December 2024

Speaker 0: Alright. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to December's version of the change log. Hope you're all having an amazing day.

If you are joining us live, welcome. Let us know in the chat where you are joining us from as usual. We love to see it. We've got a really great show for you today. We have the usual product and extension updates.

We've got the year in review for you, a community showcase, and a new show that we launched on director's TV today. So stick around if you are able to. We'd love to be able to chat with you along the way. Hello, everyone. So great for joining.

Hello. Hello. Yeah. Let us know in the chat if you are joining. Oh, Canada.

Hello. Welcome. Morning time, early morning time. Welcome. Glad for you to be joining us.

Florida, super exciting. Much more exciting than London, personally. I think so at least. But, yeah, great to have you all here with us. So I'm kicking off with Alex who's gonna take you through the product updates for December.

Speaker 1: Hey, folks. Alex here, director of web engineering, and I'm going to be taking you through the core updates that have happened since the last changelog. There's been a few releases, but here are the notable things to be aware of. In 11.2.2, we made s three connection settings configurable via environment variables. This includes things like connection timeout.

In 11.3.0, we introduced new retention settings for activities, revisions, and flow logs. These 3 system tables can become quite large, and now you can change how long they will be kept for being preened. Earlier this year, we committed to providing security updates to Directus 10 until the end of the year. Make sure you upgrade to 10.13.4 if you're still on the version 10 family. The same patch has been included in the Directus 11 patch as well.

That's all for me. Handing back over to Beth now.

Speaker 2: I'm going to demonstrate each of the extensions new in Directors Labs this month. As a reminder, Directors Labs is our team's experimental org in GitHub, which regularly publishes new extensions. Here's a demo project to showcase what's new. The address completion interface integrates Google Places auto complete data API directly into the director's editor. This improves data quality and stores data in a standard GeoJSON feature format.

It also enhances user experience by speeding up address entry. You can swap between map tiles or, when setting up the interface, skip the map altogether. The tour group interface is one we are super excited about. You can set up guided tours around director's editor to help your content authors better understand your configuration. You can set up multiple with their own labels, but we've set up one here to demonstrate.

As you see, it's a multi step tour which moves between any of the interfaces in the UI. If we go to the interface settings, here, you can see it's a group interface, so items which are children can be included in the tour. You can add any number of tour steps. We have to first specify any element to select. This extension injects a couple of classes for each field, one for the whole field including label and one just for the output.

You can specify a title and description and other metadata for display. This is gonna be so helpful when handing off your data project to end users. This is a choropleth panel. You've likely seen something like this before where countries are highlighted more intensely based on the higher values. Here, we have a views collection and a field called country, which contains a 2 letter ISO code.

You can also use 3 letter or m 49 country codes. Like many other panels, pick an aggregated field and function. Here, we are counting the number of items with the country. We think this will be useful for understanding visitors and customer data based on country. The HubSpot API operation provides a way to interact directly with the Hub Spot API from Directors Automate.

Once you provide your API key with correct access, you can interact with a load of endpoints like contacts, deals, and emails. Once you select an endpoint, you have a number of suitable actions available. Here, you can create, read, update, delete, or list your contacts. So this could be used to update a record whenever data changes in Directus, for example. We're really happy to be offering this extension to speed up integrations with your existing data sources.

Speaker 0: Alright and I have just now put the link to check out all the extensions in the chat so if you are excited, as we hope you are, about those extensions do let us know, check them out yourself. Before I put us over to the year in review, I do also want to shout out a new project Brian has created called salty open source Santa. You write a letter to Santa including your GitHub username and Santa tells you if you are on the naughty or nice list. It's all in good fun but I also am really excited that Bryant has put through a blog post and a video talking through how he created the project as well. It's well worth checking out, so I will also include the links to those in the chat as well.

Right now, I'm sending you over to Wrike to kick us off for the 2024 director's year in review.

Speaker 3: Welcome to our 2024 recap where we walk through all of the cool and exciting things we added to Directus this year. I'm Reik, the CTO and cofounder of Directus. I'm going to be kicking this off by taking you through what we shipped in new releases to the core Directus project. Seeing that we shipped over a 1,000 things, I won't be listing all of them, but here's the top ones. Opening with a small but impactful feature, we added vocal point support, which allows you to set a vocal point coordinate via the API or the data studio when you're cropping images.

That way you can ensure that the important parts of your image remain visible no matter what sizes you're generating in the API. In March, we released the beta of the marketplace, launching our extensions registry, enabling the distribution and installation of extensions in any Directus project. This was also a great way for us to be able to ship new features via extensions, which Beth will talk about later. We also brought upgrades to content versioning and live preview so you can check out what content will look like in your project without needing to publish it to the API. In version 10 dot 11, we introduced public registration, simplifying the process of allowing any user to create new accounts.

This is available both in the Studio and via our new registration and verification APIs. To further extend public registration, we also introduced configurable user limits so you can control the number of users in your project, giving you more control over how your project runs. Over the summer, we released a new major version of Directus version 11. This introduced policies, changing the way you can compose access control throughout your project. We also used this opportunity to announce our first ever extended security update period for a version of Directus for those who weren't quite ready to migrate to the new version yet.

In your project settings, you can now also find streaming system logs inside of the data studio for greater visibility into what's going on in your API and debug any problems along the way. For more information on this or any of the other things I just mentioned, do check out the detailed release notes on GitHub. Next up, we have Kevin taking you through our cloud recap.

Speaker 4: Thanks, Reich. Now I have the pleasure of recapping everything that's happened this year for directors cloud. If you've not heard of it, directors cloud is the way to host directors projects managed by the team who build it. You, of course, can still self host Directus, and we make that as easy as possible. But if you want hardware maintenance, upgrades and migrations, and storage handled, Directus Cloud is for you.

We provision a database, asset storage, caching, and more. Just a few button presses in the cloud dashboard, and you're ready to go. Now 2024 added a lot of requested features and capabilities to Directus Cloud. Probably the biggest change is to our pricing and the introduction of our new starter tier. This lowers the barrier even more to getting started, and it starts at just $15 a month.

Remember, that's not only Directus, but a database, asset storage, caching, and all of the work required to keep an application online and secure. We also introduced a new self serve business tier that sits above our existing professional tier, but for customers who aren't quite ready for enterprise. This year, we also introduced auto scaling to cloud projects to make sure they always stay online. There was actually a significant amount of infrastructure work in the background to enable all of these changes, so shout out to our infra team for making it happen. In Director's Cloud, you can now add custom domains and set advanced project configuration that allows the editing of key environment variables.

This is a big deal. It was one of the key pieces of feedback we had from cloud customers, and we're happy to have addressed it. We've picked important variables and a safe kind of pre picked allowed values to ensure that all projects on directors cloud continue to run smoothly. But if you want to see more, just reach out and let us know what you'd like to see. Lastly, we hear that launching a directors project for the first time can be a bit daunting, as you have a powerful but ultimately blank canvas to set up.

When you set up a cloud project, we now offer the ability to set it up with one of our cloud templates, one for CMS, one for CRM, and one for ecommerce use cases. That's a lot of new stuff in Director's Cloud this year. Now we're reaching the end of the year, and quite frankly, I need a nap. So I'm gonna kick it back over to Beth to talk to you about all of the new extensions we shipped in 2024. Thank you so much for coming with me on this journey this year, and I'll see you next time.

Bye for now.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Kevin. Hello again, everyone. In every change log we have, we talk through the new extensions we release. There've been quite a few, so I'm here to take you through a short recap of some of our favorites. Starting off with directors dotai.

Directors dotai is a group of 11 AI based extensions, which brought new capabilities to directors automate. We've integrated with best in class AI platforms to allow you to transcribe audio, generate images, write text, and scrape web pages. There's a whole lot in Director's AI, and we have a whole series on Directus TV to talk you through each of the extensions. We've added a bunch of new interfaces for Directus Editor. Rich interfaces for video, audio, PDF files, and address auto completion Collaborate with our new whiteboard and Wherebycalls interfaces Allow users to navigate multi selections via API with the multi level Autocomplete API interface One of our most upvoted feature requests, calculated fields, is also now available as an interface It supports loads of functions and dynamic data from your items.

And our new tool group, releasing today, allows you to create guided tools around the editor to support your content authors. We've added some really powerful new layouts. The spreadsheet layout and the Gantt chart layout. Directors Insights has also received lots of love with a load of new panels, a more detailed table that you can drop in, Lots of new charts: scatterplot, funnel, tree map, timeline, and a choropleth map. And a new flow trigger panel, so you can execute automations directly from your dashboards.

Finally, new service integrations. As well as Whereby Video calls that we mentioned earlier, we now have integrations with Flausible Analytics, resend's email service, and the HubSpot CRM. Moving away from extensions, I also want to briefly talk about templates, which is something we've also added this year that can help you get building with directors faster. This year, we launched a template directory, with templates built by both our core team and community members. Currently, there are templates for building a content management system, a customer relationship manager, an ecommerce store, an agency operating system, an event operating system, and an adventure business kit comprising a website, blog, and CMS.

These are all available to browse on directors. Io / templates. I'm gonna hand over to Carmen now for taking you through the content recap.

Speaker 5: Thanks, Beth. I'm Carmen, developer educator here at Directus. This time last year, we launched Directus TV. Between then and now, we've added over 250 episodes across nearly 40 shows. A huge amount of entertaining and educational resources.

Some highlights from this year include new seasons of 100 Apps in 100 Hours where Bryant races against the clock to create his own versions of a customer relationship manager, a remote job board, and a social media platform to name only a few. A new season of Trace Talks from John and Pedro interviewing senior engineering leaders such as David Zimmer from Netflix and Dana Lawson at Netlify on their journeys and experiences in the tech industry. Also, a new season of Short Hops continuing to take you through quick ways of getting more from Directus, the 20 24 episodes, including transformation presets, focal points, and version control. We've also launched many new shows including what's in your dock, where we ask guests to show us their most used hardware and software, Ready, Set, Battlesnake, where Andrew and Kevin build a capable snake inside of a Directus project. As well as the joy of theming where Bry Ross shows how to make theming masterpieces.

Democratizing data got to grips with using open data and Directus to build new applications around data like the trees of London and meteorite landings. Bridging Bytes brought together technology leaders to discuss the future of sustainable open source and how agencies innovate. Enter the workshop, invited friends from Twilio and Deepgram to build extensions live on air. And my new show, Sharp Focus, hosted by me as I show you how to use image transformation as part of Directus files. Keep an eye out for this and many new shows at directus.i0/tv.

This year, we've also published over 50 new tutorials to help you get the most from Directus. We've published getting started guides for Sveltekit, ASTRO, Next, Nuxt, and more. Developers in other languages, we got you. There's loads including posts for Django and Flask devs, those who use Flutter, Kotlin, and Swift, and for the Laravel community too. You can now find loads of Directus automate tutorials showed how to integrate with Clarify's image recognition APIs, GitHub and OpenAPI.

We believe you should be able to host Directus anywhere. So we wrote new content to help you deploy Directus on Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS. There are some really cool project write ups as well, including building ecommerce projects with Stripe integrations, using Directus as a baby health monitor with Opsgenie, and building event registration systems. We also have new migration posts, including one for WordPress and integration with different indexing systems like Algolia and Elasticsearch. This is not all and we encourage you to take a look at our tutorials in our docs to explore our whole collection.

That's all for me. We hope you've enjoyed this recap. And as always, if you've got any questions, let us know on Discord.

Speaker 0: Alright. So that was a recap of some of the highlights for 2024. Whether you have been with us the whole year or you are new to directors this year, we'd love to hear what your year has looked like with directors, whether anything has changed, whether you've brought in anything new that we've talked about. But, yeah, it's been great to spend a second to just look back rather than constantly looking forward, and put together the year in review for you all. So we hope you enjoyed it.

Next up is my personal favorite. I say this every month and every month it is true. It is the community showcase, and this month, we have Petrus Diaz talking through the universal translate flow operation.

Speaker 6: Hi, everyone. My name is Petros Diaz, and I'm here to demo, Directus flow operation extension that we've built called a universal translator. And the main task of the universal translators is to translate anything that you throw at it, be it a string or a JSON object or an array. Let's have a quick look of how that works. You just place the universal translator within your flow and the only thing you need to do is provide the input translate which can be a direct string or a variable and choose the language which can be based on the user language that the user has selected, or you can choose from the drop down.

We haven't included the entire language collection here, which we can do so in the future. Let's just leave it to auto for now. And just let's, let's run it real quick so you can see the results. I have a ready made flow here. So this flow creates a PDF, for the user in the language they've selected.

And let's have a look at the result. Here it is. So you can't really tell which are the translated fields here but status, author, process, location, approved all of these are translated fields. And let's look at them in the actual record and here they are. So approved becomes approved and horizontal processes becomes horizontal processes but let's also have a look in another language just to make sure that everything works as described.

And what we want to do is just run it again And here it is. Here you can see that, all of these fields have been translated to the, corresponding translations from the, directors collection, Directus translation. So the way this works, it's really simple. The operation just looks for a mustache type translation field which can be like this. So anything you want translated should go in the mustache syntax which is this here along with the closing bracket.

So, let's make it quite big so it's visible. Let's hit save and try that again. And you can see here that our mustache syntax has been translated to the to the translation from the internal collection. It's a really simple, extension, and let's have a look under the hood. So this is the actual code for the extension.

It's very short code as you can see. That's it. Just 79 lines of code, nothing remarkable. And you can see where the database pulls the, well the extension pulls language selected for the user from the database. And that's pretty much it.

The rest is just for the options and it's a very simple extension. Now why did we create this? Because we have various users using our platform in a number of languages and all of these fields, would need to be translated. So we figured a very simple way to do that, which can be used and reused. And you can even use it for sending emails using the internal emailing service.

We were considering other solutions as well, translating the fields internally through code or, just having a number of selections in all languages. But we figured that's not really viable as a solution because we are looking to expand a number of languages, and we really needed the localization for all of our all of our users. The, the challenge the biggest challenge in creating this, I think was pretty much creating the extension itself because we didn't really have experience. But using the provided guide from the director's documentation, it was actually pretty straightforward to build this, this extension. That wasn't so difficult.

I guess it would be good to expand this to make sure that it works properly in any kind of, input. It doesn't miss any nested translations, which is very important that it does a recursive search of the translations that it actually executes. We do need to replace the choices with the actual languages from the collection. This doesn't need to be hard coded. It was just for our demo.

And, I think this is pretty much it for something that needs to be translated. We don't really need to get into, more functionality or more detail, But if anybody would, be willing to help with expanding even just a little bit and, fixing our code just here and there, I would be grateful and, you know, you just make it available for everybody else as well. So, our add on is not yet our extension is not yet available on the marketplace, but you can download it from our GitHub repo, build it, and deploy it yourself, test it out. And if you have any comments, just open and, an issue in the GitHub and we'll see if we can, help out in resolving it. That was it.

Thank you for watching. And I hope you can watch any other videos we'll make in the future for any of our other extensions.

Speaker 0: Alright. Thank you once again to Petros for taking the time to record it for us and talk us through it. We always really appreciate it. If you'd like to see more about different projects that are being built with directors, highly recommend the I made this channel on discord. It's especially great because every now and then people give us updates and so you get to see kind of as it's built along, which I think is really sweet.

Next, we have an episode of Bobbie Tail's Little Library, which is a brand new show we've added to director's TV today, and it is a narrated storybook. So we have a short episode for you from that series.

Speaker 7: Bobby Tail and the library construction crew, read by Catherine Steiner. Bobby Tail had a big problem. The tree library was running out of space. Books were stacked in every corner, and new stories arrived each day. We need to build a new wing, he said, adjusting his blue vest.

But building a library wasn't like building a regular treehouse, everything needed to be perfectly organized. Binary Badger arrived first, pocket watch ticking. Before we build, he said, we need a proper blueprint. Just like a tree needs strong roots, a library needs a strong foundation.' Together, they drew plans for different rooms. 1 for storybooks, another for pictures, and a special vault for magical scrolls.

The Raymould family popped up from their tunnels, each wearing their numbered sweaters. We'll help organize everything, they squeaked excitedly. Each book needs its special place, just like we have our numbered homes. That way, we'll always know where to find things. Lily and Luna, the loop scroll sisters, swished their tails as they tested different bridges between the library sections.

We need magical pathways, Lily began, so everyone can find exactly what they're looking for, Luna finished. They created special rope bridges that connected every room to every other room. Daisy Debock Duck waddled in with her magnifying glass. 'Let's test everything,' she declared. She checked each bridge, each shelf, and each room.

We must make sure every friend can find their books easily,' she explained. Marking items off her checklist with her wing. Variable goal arrived with her magical bag. Now for the special items, she announced. Together, they created cozy reading nooks, picture frame holders, and scroll cases.

Everything had its perfect spot, ready for all kinds of woodland treasures. Finally, the new library wing was complete. Bobby Tayl stood proudly with his construction crew. The Arraymalls organized the books, the Loop sisters bridges connected everything perfectly, and Daisy Duck had tested every path. It was more than just a library, it was a magical place, where every piece of knowledge had a hole.

This story introduces the back end concepts of data modeling, APIs, and file management.

Speaker 0: Alright. Hopefully, you like that as much as we do. I am putting the link to the show for for the rest of the episodes. If you or anyone you know would like to check that out, we highly recommend. We also really enjoyed putting it together.

So glad to see you're already, liking it. Someone said, just landed. What am I watching? You were watching a new director's TV episode of Bobbie Tail's Little Library. So welcome, and glad you're here.

We have mixed up the reading list, so I'm gonna send it myself there.

Speaker 2: We put together a reading list based on resources shared by the director's core team on things they found interesting, educational, or entertaining this month, and we'd like to share it with you now. Firstly, we have an interactive study of queuing strategies from Encore, comparing 1st in, 1st out, last in, 1st out, and priority queues on wait time, drop results, and process time outs. Next, we have an interesting approach to testing query results for different database vendors. This allows you to test identical SQL results across database drivers or dialects for the same queries in a semi automated fashion. Next, there's an interesting write up on AI assisted coding from Adi Osmani talking about the hidden cost of AI speed brought about by edge case handling, error handling, and questioning output, and how AI tools help experienced developers more than beginners.

Lastly, this article is about making focus outlines look better. They're the glows that appear around form inputs in focus in the browser. We particularly like how there's some real world examples in this post as well. That's all from the reading list this month. As always, if you have your own reading list suggestions, we'd love you to share them in Discord with us.

We want to take

Speaker 0: a moment towards the end of

Speaker 2: the changelog for thanking our community contributors, who give their time to improve the director's project. Since last month, there have been 5 releases, directors 11.2.2 to directors 11.3.2 and 7 contributors. Thank you to Robson for fixing a HTML validity issue in the table component, Alex for fixing SSO GitHub sign up for users without public emails, George for allowing the login timeout for open ID SSO login to be adjusted, Nicholas for fixing typos in relational MD, Matthew for fixing WYSIWYG file upload extension to use filename disk, Ziles for fixing specifications TS to generate required array in open API schema, and Nick for adding select all and delete buttons for notification straw. Thank you again. You can see their specific pull requests inside of the full release notes on GitHub.

Lastly, we also want to take the time to thank our GitHub Sponsors of November who financially contribute to Directus' development. A huge thank you to Tessent, Entle, dmathams, Fergus, Omar, Marcus, c k, Peter, Utomit, Steven, Robson, nonlinear, Andrea Valentino, John, Wayne, Bjorn, Adam, Jason, Birka, Jens, Vincent, Mike, Khan, Lassie, and Wayfan. The money we are given from our GitHub Sponsors goes straight back to community members who build tooling and extensions for the director's ecosystem. Thank you again for being part of that.

Speaker 0: Alright. And that was the change log for December. Thank you if you are still here for joining us along the whole way. If you randomly entered into Bobby Tales and you got very confused as to what was going on, welcome and thank you for joining us the whole way too. Any questions after this is over, please put them in Discord.

We love hearing from you along the way as well. And if you have any 2025 changelog or not wishlist items that you'd like to see from us do let us know in discord too, as we are super interested in hearing how we can make this better and more interesting and useful for you all. It is for you after all. So if there is anything you'd like, this is actually I'd like to see this. Let us know.

We'll no promises, but we will see what we can do. Thank you so much once again for joining us and, yeah, have a great rest of your day, your week, and your 2024, everyone. Bye.