Main Improvements in Strapi v5.14.0 to v5.31.3

Strapi v5 has seen significant evolution from v5.14.0 to v5.31.3 (released December 3, 2025), with a focus on AI-powered features, internationalization (i18n) enhancements, UI/UX polish, and robust bug fixes. These updates span roughly mid-2025 to late 2025, emphasizing developer productivity, content management workflows, and accessibility. Below is a categorized summary of the key improvements, aggregated from release notes. This highlights user-facing changes while grouping similar updates for brevity.

New Features

• AI Translations: Automatically translate content across locales on save, including dynamic zones and blocks—eliminating manual copy/paste workflows and enabling seamless global content sync.
• File-Type Restrictions for Uploads: Enforce specific MIME types for media uploads to improve security and compliance (v5.31.0).
• AI-Generated Image Metadata: Automatically generate and attach metadata to AI-created images in the media library (v5.27.0).
• Homepage Customization: Allow admins to personalize the admin panel homepage with custom widgets and layouts (v5.28.0).
• Rich-Text Link Attributes: Add extra attributes (e.g., target, rel) to JSON blocks in rich-text editors for better SEO and accessibility (v5.30.0).
• Responsive Navigation: Full mobile-optimized sidenav with improved scrolling and subnav responsiveness (v5.27.0).
• Media Library Accessibility: Added ARIA-selected states and click handlers for keyboard navigation in asset selection modals (v5.31.1).

Enhancements & UI/UX Improvements

• AI Chat Optimizations: Auto-open AI chat on relevant actions, cache tokens in memory for faster responses, and add loading indicators for i18n tasks (v5.30.0–v5.30.1).
• Locale Management UX: Improved combobox for adding locales, alphabetical sorting in pickers, and prefill non-translatable fields from default locales (v5.30.1–v5.31.1).
• Component Replacements: Swapped legacy singleselect with modern combobox components for better search and selection UX across forms (v5.30.1).
• Upgrade Tool Enhancements: Better detection of package registry URLs during migrations, with clearer prompts and flag handling (v5.31.1).
• Cookie Security Config: Expanded options for secure, same-site, and domain-specific cookie handling in auth flows (v5.28.0).
• Plugin Generators: Streamlined scaffolding for custom plugins with improved templates and i18n support (v5.30.1).
• NPS Survey Responsiveness: Made feedback surveys mobile-friendly with better layout and interaction handling (v5.30.1).

i18n & Localization Improvements

• Locale-Specific Handling: Fixed bulk unpublish/create to target only selected locales; added "Available In" column behaviors and query param support for locale=* pagination (v5.30.1–v5.31.1).
• Relation & Field Sync: Prevent unnecessary triggers for non-translatable content; populate media fields per locale and include locales in "last modified" widgets (v5.30.0–v5.31.1).
• Picker & Tooltip Fixes: Alphabetical ordering, full locale visibility, and working tooltips for i18n fields; avoid marking published content as modified during queries (v5.29.0–v5.30.0).
• Fill-from-Other-Locale: Resolved empty component creation issues and ensured proper prefill for new entries (v5.29.0–v5.30.1).
• Translation Keys: Added Vietnamese, French, Portuguese-BR, and Japanese-English keys; globalized bulk-move modals and email templates (multiple releases).

Bug Fixes

• Content Manager Stability: Fixed edit-view form triggers (e.g., Enter key), unsaved data warnings on page close, and field preservation (visible: false) on submit (v5.31.1–v5.31.3).
• i18n Workflow Issues: Resolved flickering on i18n fields, double "go back" buttons, pagination counts, and relation counts from locale-aware documents (v5.30.0–v5.31.1).
• Media & Upload: Prevented broken breadcrumbs in deep folders, disabled edit buttons on disabled inputs, and fixed ordering/selection resets (v5.28.0–v5.29.0).
• Admin Panel Reliability: Stopped admins from self-deletion, fixed list jumps on checkbox selection, and enforced max length on short text fields (v5.30.1–v5.31.1).
• API & Query Fixes: Improved GraphQL scope inheritance, CORS customization, and TypeScript errors in Document API (e.g., documentId as field value) (v5.31.1).
• Form & Input Handling: Added optional chaining for retention days, cleared time-only fields properly, and prevented iOS zoom on focus (v5.30.0–v5.31.1).
• Bulk Actions: Disabled states now prevent execution; fixed non-unique keys in dynamic zone menus (v5.29.0–v5.31.1).

Performance & Security Updates

• Dependency Bumps: Updated Cloudinary (1.41.0 → 2.7.0), tar-fs (2.1.1 → 2.1.4), axios, form-data, sha.js, and brace-expansion for security and compatibility (v5.28.0–v5.31.1).
• Cache & Query Optimizations: Invalidate document cache post-publish; use query engine for i18n to avoid unnecessary modifications (v5.29.0–v5.30.0).
• Node.js Support: Added official Node 24 compatibility with testing utilities like setupDatabaseReset (v5.31.0).
• CSP & Encryption: Extended Content Security Policy configs; replaced deprecated Buffer.slice() with subarray() (v5.30.0–v5.31.3).
• License Gating: Disabled AI features for non-Growth licenses by default; isolated AI APIs to EE folder (v5.31.1–v5.31.3).

Documentation & Other Changes

• Translation & Testing: Updated admin UI translations (e.g., French, pt-BR); replaced deprecated testing APIs like act() with testing-library standards (multiple).
• Build & CI Fixes: Improved local docs builds, Husky setup scripts, and release commit flags (v5.30.1–v5.31.3).
• Deprecation Handling: Reverted unstable AI-localization flags; cleaned up component-join tables for published relations (v5.30.0).
• Accessibility Tweaks: Enhanced keyboard nav in Content-Type Builder and responsive left menu (v5.29.0–v5.31.1).

Overall, this period marks Strapi's push toward AI-driven content workflows and polished i18n, making it more suitable for global, multi-locale sites. For full details, check the GitHub releases. Upgrading? Review breaking changes in the official docs.

An enormous amount of work has improved strapi since this request was first made:

https://github.com/strapi/strapi/compare/v3.0.5...v5.14.0

Redesigned admin panel, enhanced plugin systems, and better API performance.

Strapi 5 introduced advanced content management features like Draft & Publish with history and multi-environment support.

Anyone know how this compares to Directus?

• https://www.cloudpanel.io/supported-applications/

And, Cloudron focuses more on Personal Productivity & Business Ops apps, for now at least.

Strapi looks great, but I bet something like Cal.com or tldraw.com being packaged would give everyone here more value. Best of both worlds from platforms each focused on what they do best, and have most existing users asking for.

Here's the repo where you can check it out: https://git.cloudron.io/msbt/strapi-app

After you've built and installed it, you have to run /usr/local/bin/gosu cloudron:cloudron yarn build in the terminal to build the adminpanel, this step can be added to the start.sh as well, but I wanted to do it manually for the time being, because it takes quite a while on slower machines. Talking of which: this step requires 2,5GB+ RAM, so make sure your machine has plenty available. After that you can create an admin user.

Email:

• When I try to use SMTPS, it says error Error: Couldn't send test email: Greeting never received.
• When using SMTP: error Error: Couldn't send test email: Mail command failed: 550 Authenticated user strapi.app@example.com cannot send mail as .

As for the slugify issue: I followed the tutorial from here to dynamically create slugs for collections, but as soon as I edit the modelname.js in /api/collectionname/models/ and add const slugify = require('slugify');, strapi crashes with Error: Cannot find module 'slugify' even though it's in node_modules and referred to from other places - no idea why, if I build strapi on an empty machine with just a few commands, it works without any issues:

apt update
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_14.x | sudo bash -
apt-get install -y nodejs
npm install --global yarn
yarn create strapi-app cloudron --quickstart --no-run
cd cloudron/
yarn add pg slugify strapi-provider-email-smtp
yarn strapi install email documentation graphql
yarn build
yarn develop

So if you don't need email or slugs, you're good to go

Hello

Thank you for your interest in Strapi. Here's a bunch of updates about our product and pricing.

New hosted demo

For those of you who did not get a chance to try out all the features that Strapi provides out of the box, we now have a brand new and optimized hosted trial experience. Launch a Strapi project with sample data in seconds without having to install anything on your machine!

Strapi 3.2 is now available!

Last week we announced Strapi 3.2 with the long-awaited feature: Draft & Publish!

In short, it lets you save your content as a draft, edit and publish it at any time. Join our online meetup to see the feature demo and know what other product updates are planned!

Starters library and templates

We added a new template option to the create-strapi-app CLI. With these templates, you can create new Strapi projects that already have content types and plugins pre-configured for you. Browse the Strapi starters library for corporate sites, portfolio or blogs.

Pricing update: introducing the Bronze Plan

Strapi Enterprise Bronze Edition is all about giving you easier access to custom roles for a discounted price of $29 monthly.

Read through the details in the pricing page.

Stay tuned for more news!

Cheers,

The Strapi team

Here's the repo: https://git.cloudron.io/msbt/strapi-app

You build it, install it, jump on the terminal, cwd into /app/pkg/cloudron and run yarn build. The build process requires 2GB of RAM, I tried with less and it failed a few times. This step should eventually go into the start.sh, but I was rebuilding a lot, that's why it's still there.

After that the adminpanel is available in /admin where you can create your first user and add data.

What's not working (from what I can see):

• Email (the plugins are installed (nodemailer and such), but something must be wrong with my plugins.js, at some point it complained about a self-signed cert, after that I couldn't get it to work at all)
• Installing/uninstalling plugins, that's why all 7 are installed by default now

Other than that, tests are missing, but it doesn't look so bad.

If noone is on it, I might give it a shot, but I've never packaged node.js before, probably gonna be a bumpy one.

I'm sure Directus & Strapi will be popular with devs, the next most popular one being NetlifyCMS. Again, would capture a lot of "{platform name} hosting" searches.

Directus is indeed as you said. It's like a fast SQL database design/prototyping tool. Have to look into strapi after that.