February 2025

Speaker 0: Alright. Hello, everyone. I hope you're having a great day. I'm Beth, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to the February change log. As usual, if you are live, do let us know in the chat where you are joining us from.

We have a great set of updates for you today. We have some product updates. We've got some new extensions, some tutorials coming for you very soon. We have a new episode of a brand new director's TV show that has launched today, and we have Lindsay with a starter's preview. So do stick around if you are able to.

And I'm gonna kick us off by sending this over to Kevin for some product updates.

Speaker 1: Hello. Kevin here with an update on what's new in Directus version eleven point four point one. This is a nice small release with some quality of life improvements. Firstly, we have standardized how delete buttons work across the Data Studio with a new component. They have a nice little confirmation dialogue so you don't mistakenly delete things in future expecting it to be there when it wasn't always.

The translation store is now available to app extension authors, which makes it easier to create multi language app extensions for the Data Studio. Directus now supports rendering many to any items in related value displays, for example, in layouts. And the send email operation now supports cc, bcc, and reply to fields, which like everything in Directus Automate can take in dynamic values. There's also been a whole bunch of little fixes which are rooted in consistency and standardization across Directus. You can check the full release notes in GitHub.

You can download Directus eleven point four point one from Docker Hub and use these new additions in Directus Cloud right now. Thank you so much for joining me, and we'll see you next time.

Speaker 2: Hi. I'm Mike, and I'm from the developer experience team. I'm going to demonstrate each of the new extensions in Directus Labs this month. As a reminder, Directus Labs is our team's experimental org on GitHub, which regularly publishes new extensions. The first extension we'll go through is going to be the YouTube embed, which is listed here, and I've put it as video cast.

If we open up the item, we can add URL, and then we'll have the actual interface itself. This is configured using the Google Console API and the channel specifically you want to look at. So I'm just going to randomly select something so I know it makes sense. Copy that. Add that there just for a little bit of context for myself.

Look into YouTube and then look up sell. Copy the item. Remember to put this into the code of the content of from the WYSIWYG if necessary. And

Speaker 3: we are

Speaker 2: good. And that is the YouTube interface. The next extension we'll show is the AI researcher bundle. With this one, we can configure it with anthropic or open AI models. All you require is your API key to add to it.

So in this case, I have my PhD thesis, and I want to ask something about quarks. What is a quark? It'll go away and ask the model and return the answer. And it does it in great depth. How many types are there?

And since we've been asking separate questions and we want to keep the context of the conversation, the entire conversation is available in this pop up whilst still maintaining the main value. So we can close that and move on. And here we have our final extension of the day. This is the inline repeater. As you can see, it has elements that can be expanded and include multiple items as part of them.

So here we have the service and the URL for a podcast. I'm gonna add a new one here. And we're gonna go to Spotify and just grab the URL. Add that in. And we'll we'll have multiple inline elements containing the different objects.

We can add as many as we like as part of this repeater. Thanks.

Speaker 0: Alright. Thank you so much to Kevin and Mike for those updates. If you're planning on using anything that they've mentioned or if you've got any questions about it, do let us know here in the chat or on discord and we'll do our best to get you your answers. And next up we are very excited to have Lindsay talking about starters preview. So here is Lindsay.

Speaker 3: Hi. I'm Lindsay Zylstra. Today, I'm excited to introduce you to our new Next. Js simple CMS starter. This starter is designed to work with our simple CMS back end template.

It gives you a powerful starting point to build off of or modify to meet your unique needs so you can style and customize quickly without getting bogged down with the setup. But what exactly is this starter? Essentially, it's a ready to use framework specific front end that connects seamlessly with our simple CMS back end to help you build full CMS web applications. With this starter, you benefit from a robust Directus integration that simplifies content management, along with Next. Js App Router that effortlessly handles dynamic routing and layouts.

We've we've also incorporated Tailwind CSS and ShadCn components to offer rapid, utility first styling. Plus, it comes with built in examples that show you how to implement live previews, add customized blocks, set up dynamic form fields, all of this giving you a complete toolkit to kick start your projects. Let me switch over to my screen for a quick demo. First, I'm gonna show you our Directus integration in Versus Code. Here you can see we're using the Directus SDK along with a fetchers file here that gives a great example of how to retrieve data from Directus seamlessly.

We've also included a command line tool to generate Directus types automatically, saving you the hassle of creating them manually. Now if we look over here at our direct Us pages content, you can see our starter pages build dynamically from direct Us data. This dynamic approach allows you to add blocks and construct your pages, and we've integrated site map generation and SEO in order to give you a head start on making your site more discoverable. We've left most of the styling up to you with only minimal opinionated design choices. However, we've included useful features like dark mode and the ability to set an accent color So you can easily tailor the look to match your brand.

Moving on to dynamic forms. Our dynamic forms are designed to offer flexibility. You can quickly create forms with fields defined in Directus. For example, here's a contact us form. You can set customized success messages as well as change your submit labels and add in any type of field you'd like to see.

We manage validations through Zod, schema validation. This setup makes it straightforward to add any additional validations you might need. Here's the contact us form on the page. Finally, we'll take a look at our global search. It provides a basic search right out of the box.

You have the capability to expand it for deeper and more comprehensive searches as your project grows. Each of these features work together to create a flexible, developer friendly starter that empowers you to build full CMS powered web applications without unnecessary overhead. Our primary goal was to create a developer friendly experience that tackles common challenges head on. We focused on ensuring smooth live preview, flexible content management, and intuitive setup, whether you're running Directus in the cloud or locally. So how do you get access to this?

You can find this code in our Directus Labs repo under starters. Dive right in by following our detailed setup instructions available in the ReadMe files. This will get you up and running with all the features we've discussed. As a sneak peek, we're also working on a command line tool that'll be out in beta soon. This will simplify the installation and configuration even further so you can focus on building and less on setup.

That's our quick overview of our Next. Js simple CMS starter with Directus integration. I hope you enjoyed this walk through. In the coming months, we plan to release more of these starters for other popular frameworks as well as more that will pair with our other back end templates. So be sure to check back in.

If you're interested in the command line tool or any of our future starters that will be released, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Thank you for watching. I can't wait to see what you build with this tool. Have a great day.

Speaker 0: Alright. Thank you so much to Lindsay, and we're hoping that you're as excited as we are to be able to share that. Before I move us on to the episode of Translation Station, I wanna highlight that we've got some, exciting tutorials coming your way to the new docs very soon. We have implementing direct us live preview and using direct us off, in Next, Nuxt, Astro, and SvelteKit, and they'll be available very soon. So do check back, if that sounds good to you.

Next, we have episode one of translation station, which is a four part new directors TV series. It's exploring the opportunities of localization in directors. And as a series, it covers topics from translating the director's code base, translation strings, translating your content, and accessing your translated content via the director's APIs. Have I said translation one too many times? I think you get the idea that it's all about translations, so here is episode one.

Speaker 4: Carmen, developer, educator, and translation station. Translation station. Alright. Back to English. So here we've got a direct us project that I'm running for my blog.

And, yeah, just one blog post for now. We'll be filling it up with time. I wanted to show you in the data studio the collections I've got. I've got some authors, I've got some languages, and I've got some posts. So, as you can see, my computer's default language is English.

Now, my Directus project is also running by default in English. But what if I wanna make it available in another language? What I can do is go over to the settings module and then the settings page itself where amongst other settings, I'm gonna find the default language. I'm gonna open this up and show you just how many languages we have available here. And not just languages, but languages specific to a region.

So, I'm gonna scroll down being Chilean myself, I'm gonna set my language to Latin American Spanish. Gina's there too, but I wanna encompass all of this continent. Click on that and I'm going to save my changes. You can see now that a bunch of things have changed already. I'm in the setting in the modules instead of settings and so on and so forth.

What's really key to know here is the Directus project language has now changed. But what happens to the rest of our things? For example, in our data model, or modelo de depos, we're gonna see that the names of our collections haven't changed. Or, if we go to content or contenido as it is now, we're gonna see that my blog post stays the same, even the fields on the blog post themselves. But that's to be expected because our project is now in Spanish, but the content itself and the data model are still in English because that's how it was when I created it.

But what I want to focus on here is the language of the Directus project itself. Let's go back to our settings module real quick. You might be wondering where do the translations for these come from and how can I change or contribute to them? Now given that Directus is open source under the BSL license, we actually get these translations as open source contributions. That's right.

You can contribute your own translations to Directus. Next, I'm gonna show you how to do that. Over in the Directus documentation, under Resources, Community, and contribution translations, we're gonna find the instructions for how to contribute localizations to the Directus Data Studio, and this is done via platform called Crowdin. So over in Crowdin, we can see there's a bunch of translations that exist, which I love to see. We've got Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, Estonian, and a whole bunch of other languages.

So, how can I contribute to a language, say, if I find a typo? First thing I need to do is log in to Crowded, which is via a free account. Now that I'm logged in, I can go ahead and look for my language and start contributing to it. For example, let's look for Spanish and specifically focus on that Spanish Latin America. Now on this page, I'm gonna click on translate all.

This will give me a list of all of the strings or pieces of text that can be translated in Directus. Now here, under editing preset, I can see the string editor predefinido. But because this is in the current test we're currently editing, it should actually be editando predefinido. So what I'm gonna do is make that suggestion and save it. But because there's already an approved translation, what I'm gonna do is notify a proofreader.

Cool. So now my suggestion is made to improve this Latin American Spanish translation of Directus. But what happens next? So our team over at Directus is going to get a pull request from Crowdin with the change that I've made. Now you might be thinking, well, why don't I just make the pull request if it's open source?

Bear in mind that crowding's automatic synchronization is going to overwrite any changes that don't correspond with crowding itself. So it's best to make those translations directly through crowding. Now, the last question is, when am I gonna get that new string? It'll be merged into Directus itself and will be available in the next release. So, now we just gotta sit tight.

Alright. Well, there you have it. How to configure your Directus project in another language, which strings are translated directly, and how to contribute your own translations to the greater Directus ecosystem. I hope this was helpful, but there's more stops on this translation station journey we're going on. We'll also be learning about translation strings, translating content in the data studio, and accessing translated content in your own application.

So all aboard for the next station, and off we go. See you next time.

Speaker 5: We want to take a moment towards the end of the change log for thanking our amazing community contributors who give their time to improve the director's project. Since last month, there have been three contributors. A huge thank you to Nicholas for fixing conditional interface options incorrectly replacing choices, High Vibes only for adding support for CC, BCC, and reply to fields to the email operation, iodele for fixing a grammar error in the live preview documentation. Thank you again, and 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 January who financially contribute to Directus' development.

A huge thank you to Wei Fan, Entel, Jamiluddin, Fergus, Omar, Marcus, c k, Peter, Utomic, Steven, Robson, nonlinear, Andreas, Valentino, John, Wayne, Burb, Adam, Jason, Birka, Jens, Vincent, Mike, Khan, and Lassie. 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. For this month's reading list, we're going off script and sharing an audio special of our favorite tech and tech adjacent podcasts. Firstly, one that you've likely heard of, Syntax, a podcast about web development covering topics including full stack web development, the latest frameworks, databases, and lots more. There's over 800 episodes, so lots to check out.

Next, we have Waveform, a weekly podcast aimed at gadget lovers covering trends and product reviews. Next is Darknet Diaries, which explores topics from the dark web like cybercrime, hacking, and other less than legal activities, as well as the people fighting back against them. Deep Questions with Cal Newport focuses on productivity and the struggle to work and live deeply in a world with lots of digital distractions. Decoder is a new show from The Verge that members of our team have been enjoying for its interviews with technology leaders on their take on technology and the future of it all. The DevTools podcast does what it says on the tin.

It's a podcast about developer tools and the people who make them, with lots of interesting guests from companies you're probably using. Hiking humans looks behind the social engineering scams, phishing schemes, and criminal exploits that are making headlines and taking a heavy toll on organizations around the world. What the Shell, aside from having an exceptional name, provides an accessible look into major hacks and vulnerabilities through looking at incidents and news. And lastly, but in no means least, open observability talks discuss harnessing the power of open source to advance observability initiatives with guests that range from open source project creators, end users, and thought leaders. We hope you enjoy checking out some of the podcasts.

If you've got your own recommendations, do share them with us. We'd love to hear what you're listening to.

Speaker 0: Alright and that is it for February's the changelog. If you have any questions about anything you've seen and whether you're joining us live or, watching on demand do get over to discord and we'll be able to help help you out over there. Do check out Director TV. We are always adding new shows. You should be able to find translation station.

It will be right at the top, so you shouldn't be able to miss it. As always, if you've got any feedback about things you'd like to see within the changelog, very searchable feedback. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Thank you so much if you have made it this far for sticking with us and spending your time with us. We really appreciate it.

And please head over to Discord for the next info on the change log for March. Have a great day, everyone, and I'll chat with you soon. Bye.