Introducing CrafterCMS 3.1

CrafterCMS 3.1 Community Edition just released and we couldn't be more excited! It's a huge release that continues to re-define CMS as a pivotal component of a best-of-breed digital experience stack for highly innovative organizations. That sounds like marketing speak but it’s not. The CrafterCMS 3.1 release doubles down on our mission as a CMS platform to help organizations build and operate cloud-scale digital experience applications using modern tools and methods. CrafterCMS is great for authors and at the same time gives developers and operations the ability to innovate quickly with the technology, tools and processes they want. Let’s take a look at some of the new capabilities in CrafterCMS 3.1 that makes this possible.

Headless CMS In-Context Editing, Anywhere

CrafterCMS lets your content authors manage content for any applications, websites, portals, kiosks, VR or AR experiences, native apps, chatbots and other experiences using easy-to-use web-based tools with the drag-and-drop style tools that they had before headless CMS came along and re-introduced clumsy forms and publish-to-preview workflows. Crafter’s in-context editing, drag-and-drop, multi-channel preview, targeting and other tools make editing headless content just as easy as it was with traditional CMS tools. CrafterCMS 3.1 improves Studio’s ability to integrate authoring capabiltiies with any application, running on any server, written in any language/framework.

Planet-Scale Serverless Dynamic Content Delivery

CrafterCMS 3.1 supports planet-scale, elastic content delivery in a whole new and truly serverless fashion. You can now elastically scale up or down to any size, anywhere in the world more easily using standard cloud orchestration technologies and tooling with our new serverless architecture. To achieve this we’ve added diskless support to Crafter Engine that integrates directly with globally-distributed, cloud-based blob storage APIs (S3, S3 compatible)  and Elasticsearch services. Further, we added native support for containers and container orchestration through out-of-the-box support for Docker and Kubernetes. Operating and scaling your CMS has never been easier, more reliable or more scalable.

CrafterCMS is a GraphQL Server for Content

CrafterCMS is now a full-featured GraphQL server! What is GraphQL? GraphQL is a popular open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs. GraphQL offers a platform-agnostic interface for retrieving content and data through an interface that is widely adopted by the development community at large. Further, GraphQL has bindings for nearly every programming language. CrafterCMS 3.1 introduces native GraphQL support that makes your content available as RESTful APIs via standard GraphQL query language mechanics. Crafter's GraphQL server is blindingly fast and easy-to-use. We automatically manage your schema for you based on content type definitions and we provide out-of-the box integration with GraphiQL interface to help you quickly create your GraphQL queries. 

Native Elasticsearch Support

CrafterCMS now has native Elasticsearch support. Elasticsearch is an open source, lucene-based search index and information retrieval engine. We automatically index all of your content including rich documents and media into Elasticsearch. Our Elasticsearch integration supports keyword search, fuzzy-matching, "more like this", "did you mean?", suggestions functionality and other advanced features to support content search, query and other sophisticated content retrieval use cases. Elasticsearch is alterative to Apache Solr, a lucene-based search platform that CrafterCMS already supports. 

Crafter Studio Updates

In addition to all the powerful content delivery capabilities we've added in CrafterCMS 3.1, we've also made some major upgrades to Crafter Studio. There are too many to list in this blog but let's take a quick look at some of the major updates.

Master-Master Clustering

Crafter Studio clustering just got a major upgrade with CrafterCMS 3.1 release. Our new clustering has a master-master topology that gives you a much higher level of reliability and improved write performance. Further, because Crafter Studio’s repository is Git-based our clustering is much more distributable than what you see with traditional CMS platforms that attempt to cluster on top of pure database and JCR stores. Is the cluster hard to set up? No. It’s a snap. With CrafterCMS 3.1, Studio configuration is extremely simple. Studio nodes automatically discover and join the cluster when they come online.

Organization-level Permissions

Crafter Studio is a multi-tenant web-based authoring application that supports fine grained permissions per site and per role. CrafterCMS 3.1 introduces the concept of organization into Crafter Studio’s management and authorization scheme enabling you to more easily group and manage sites across multiple departments or organizations.

New CMS Search Interface

Crafter’s Studio content search just got a major capability boost and a facelift! Search inside the CMS is now more beautiful / visual and we’ve introduced out-of-the-box filters that make search easier than ever to use. Under the hood we’ve also done a lot of work to Crafter Studio's search capability. You can expect to see much more search-driven authoring tools in the near future.

Rich Text Editor Upgrade

We updated our Rich Text Editor (RTE) to TinyMCE 5. Great rich text editing capabilities are an extremely important part of any CMS platform. CrafterCMS  3.1 now lets you take advantage of TinyMCE’s latest and greatest stable feature set.

New Code Editors

Those familiar with CrafterCMS know that we’re a Git-based CMS and that developers can use their own desktop tool chain with our CMS rather than working through a web UI. That said, sometimes you want or need to make a quick edit to a template or some javascript. CrafterCMS 3.1 introduces a beautiful new code editor with auto-completion, syntax highlighting and other code editing features that make quick code edits much easier.

New Video Center Blueprint

In recent years video has become one of the most important mediums for marketing, corporate communications, education and training. Organizations are looking for feature-rich, secure, branded distribution channels for both live and on-demand video content. To this end, CrafterCMS 3.1 introduces a brand new Video Center blueprint. Now you can quickly spin up and configure any number of private "Youtube-like", consumer-grade video sites to manage and distribute your live and on-demand video content. The blueprint is beautifully built on React JS as a Headless SPA application. It’s fully extensible and it is integrated with Youtube and AWS Elemental Media Services right out-of-the-box


You can find more in-depth coverage of CrafterCMS architecture here along with complete list of features and other updates for the release in the CrafterCMS 3.1 Release Notes. You can download and try CrafterCMS 3.1 for yourself here.