Nextly Alpha: What's Ready and What's Next

Nextly is in alpha. This is what that means in practice: what you can build with it today, what it cannot do yet, and how much the ground is likely to move under you.

The published release is 0.0.2-alpha.62.

What ships

The alpha is not a preview of a CMS. It is a CMS, with the pieces you would expect from one:

• Content modelling. Collections and singles, defined in TypeScript or built in the Visual Schema Builder. Localization for multi-language content. Content versioning with drafts.
• Editing. An admin panel, a Lexical rich text editor, a media library, admin widgets, and a visual page builder for composing pages from blocks.
• Access. Role-based access control with field-level permissions, so a role can be denied a single field rather than a whole collection.
• Data. Postgres, MySQL and SQLite, behind one adapter interface. Migrations through the CLI.
• Extension. A plugin system, a hooks system, background jobs, webhooks, and an audit log.
• Publishing. Releases, preview links with an editor preview pane, and an SEO plugin that adds a meta field group and serves a sitemap.
• Getting started. create-nextly-app and project templates.

What does not ship

Being specific about this is more useful than a stability badge.

• No GraphQL API. There is a REST API and an in-process data API. GraphQL is in the Now lane.
• No live preview. Draft preview links work, and the editor has a preview pane. What does not exist is unsaved edits streaming into that frame as you type.
• No real-time. No subscriptions, no WebSocket layer.
• No hosted offering and no plugin marketplace.
• No editorial workflow beyond draft and published. Review and approval stages are something you build with a select field and access rules today.

How much will change

Alpha means the APIs can change between releases, and they have. Pin exact versions:

npm install nextly@0.0.2-alpha.62

Every @nextlyhq/* package moves in lockstep with the same version number, so pin them together. If you upgrade, read the release notes rather than assuming a patch bump is safe; that is what the number is warning you about.

What we try hard not to do is change your data underneath you. Schema changes go through migrations you can read.

Trying it

npx create-nextly-app@0.0.2-alpha.62 my-app

Then point it at a database. Nextly selects the adapter from your environment rather than from a config object:

DB_DIALECT=postgresql
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://user:password@localhost:5432/my_app

Postgres is the recommended dialect: it has the fullest feature set and the fewest behavioural workarounds. SQLite is a good choice for local development.

What would help most

Bug reports with a reproduction, and honest accounts of where the product got in your way. The alpha exists to find out which of our decisions are wrong while changing them is still cheap.

• Open an issue for a bug or a feature request
• GitHub Discussions for design questions and ideas
• Discord for anything faster than that

The roadmap shows what is shipped, in progress, and queued, with no dates attached to any of it.