Question: What are the main pain points you have using Strapi? (Episode 5)

[derrickmehaffy]

Four years ago the Strapi Chief Product Officer @Aurelsicoko asked the community what their main pain points were and how critical these issues were to the rest of the community.

Since then, every year (2022, 2021, 2020, 2019) for the month of June we have asked the same question.

This year is a special one given we have started working on Strapi v5. Once again the Strapi team wish to get the broad community feedback, so the question again this year is: what are the main pain points you have using Strapi?

Some Rules for this issue:

• Please try to be short and to the point and describe your use-case and why you feel this is an important issue.
• Only one pain point per comment (you can add as many comments as you want, but only one per comment please)
• Be sure to construct pain points respectfully and constructively, following our Code of Conduct

---

Instructions

• Please only post one pain point at a time.
• If your pain point has already been listed, make sure to upvote it instead of posting a similar message. A simple 👍 will suffice.

Template

• Issue: Please describe your issue.
• Context: Give more details about the use case.

Copy paste the following markdown template:

### Pain point

**Issue:** 
Please describe your issue.

**Context:** 
Give more details about the use case.

**Which version are you on:**
v3 or v4

---

We look forward to reading all your comments. All contributions are welcomed, don't be shy 🙈

[drizztdourden08]

Nested components is my main pain point personally. It is supported at the code level at least now, but becomes an issue to maintain for those less knowledgeable with strapi.

supporting real nested component at more than just 2 level would be a major thing as it permit the data to be way more self container and reusable.

[drizztdourden08]

Dynamic zone in compponents

[raykeating]

A big pain point when building CRUD apps is implementing security policies. Almost every "create", "delete", or "update" route needs an is-owner policy added to make sure the public endpoint isn't being used to delete entries created by other users. The middleware is fairly simple, but is tedious to implement for every route, and certainly seems like a security concern to me.

It would be great if in v5 we had a system that made implementing this additional security layer possible from the admin panel. Supabase does a good job of this

[GLorenz90]

Collapsable Menus

Issue:
The admin's left nav is only currently usable on desktop, despite the information side being responsive. This is because the left nav cannot be collapsed to a hamburger button or something similar. If each of the 2 layers could be closed and opened independently it would be much more usable on mobile platforms for quick changes.

Context:
If you have even simple data with basic relations, and need to make an adjustment on the road, it is a nightmare to use the admin on a phone currently.

Which version are you on:
v4

[drizztdourden08]

Missing common type without plugin. Array type being the first one. Or an “enum” section where we can set them up, and reuse them as premade enumaration.

[GLorenz90]

Content Type Grouping in menu

Issue:
There's no current built in way to group content types to make them collapsable.

Context:
Let's say you have a directory listing, directory contact, a directory category, and directory subcategory type. If you aren't working on the directory, that is 4 items that would be nice to collapse down into a "directory" group or tab of any kind. Let's say you have 5 other sets of items structured similarly, that's more than half of the type options that are just noise.

Which version are you on:
v4

[strapi-bot]

This issue has been mentioned on Strapi Community Forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.strapi.io/t/annual-pain-points-issue/28895/1

[drizztdourden08]

Possibilities of storing views directly in code instead of in database. This is very much an hassle to migrate stuff with the cli, especially when you need to filter configuration to not include other thing.

you configure the view, and you just want them to be functional the same way as components and other things. I’d take recompiling strapi everytime instead of having to go through exporting and importing everytime and sometimes leading to error and losing some.

[TRiBotWillB]

Edit by @derrickmehaffy, hiding due to duplicate of #16873 (comment)

Nested components / dynamic zones in components!

[GregorSondermeier]

Issue:
Too many breaking changes between minor and even patch updates and not sticking to semantic versioning.

Context:
It's very tough to upgrade Strapi dependencies and almost impossible to feel confident that stuff continues to work after having upgraded. That's the case even within v4.

v4.5 aimed to prepare the database for the relation sorting, v4.6 brought the relation sorting but it didn't fully work until v4.6.x and even broke some Strapi instances.

Some design system components were refactored from JS to TS, the refactoring was released with v4.10.6, it contained bugs and boom, stuff didn't work anymore after upgrading from v4.10.5 to v4.10.6.

The list could go on but you get the point.

[icheered]

Issue:
There is no easy/direct way to have an enumerable field that is editable by the client. Ideally there would be an enumerable where the client can add/edit/remove items and change the order of items.

Context:
Multiple times I have had the need for an enumerable field to assign a class to a collection item but a text field is too error prone for the client to use.

Examples I have encountered:

• grouping items on a restaurant menu: menuItemType (hot drink, cold drink, lunch, dinner)
• changing the color of a store item to highlight the item: highlightColor (red, green, blue)
• adding different subpages in a store: itemCategory (magazine, comic, novel)
• implementing a filtering system: bookCategory (romance, history, true crime)

My current solution is to create a collection type named 'category' and a collection type named 'item'. Then I add a 'relation' field to the item. Massive downside: I cannot make the relation field required, even when adding the 'required' field manually in backend code it will only show a little red asterix but does not stop the client from leaving the field empty.

Which version are you on:
v4

[GregorSondermeier]

Issue:
JavaScript; Magical Strapi Object; practically unusable TypeScript support.

Context:
The dev experience feels very 2010ish. It's impossible to know the content of a deeply nested property within the strapi object unless you either belong to the core team or know the documentation by heart. The only way to consistently know what's in the variable is by setting a breakpoint and debugging.

The TypeScript support that exists in v4 is practically unusable since it's incomplete and it's lying, which makes me as a developer not only fight Strapi but also fight TypeScript. Less experienced developers get confused if TypeScript says a certain property does not exist, even though it does at runtime. Or if it has a different type at runtime from how it is typed.

If Strapi would be implemented in TypeScript from the ground up, productivity could increase immensely because you get intellisense and documentation by default. The code would document itself.

[raykeating]

This is a minor one, but it would be great if the admin panel could be customized a bit more for clients. I feel like the developer experience is great with Strapi, but the experience for clients is still lacking.

For example: the purple accent is very opinionated and in general it looks good, but it would be a nice touch if when we hand off the strapi dashboards to our clients, we could pick an accent color that fits their brand kit. Similar to how we can change the logo in the top left of the dashboard now.

Another example: Most of our clients only ever interact with the content manager. But right now it's tucked away in a tab and the collection-types builder is visible even when running in production mode (despite the fact that it's not really usable unless you're in development mode). There should be an editor view that is much more minimalistic and only shows clients exactly what they need to edit, similar to Sanity or some of the other more lightweight CMS's