Storyblok V2 Early Preview is here!

Starting from today, Storyblok V2 Early Preview will be available to all Storyblok users!

In September 2021, we invited some of our users to try the V2 Beta. More than 3,600 people followed our invitation and experienced Storyblok V2 Beta. After seeing the great reception and feedback from our community, we are now offering the V2 Early Preview to everyone with a Storyblok account! You can start experiencing our new powerful Visual Editor and the completely new “Discussions'' feature by pressing the “Try Storyblok V2” blue button in your Storyblok app.

What is Storyblok V2?

We always believed that Storyblok should offer a unique combination of visual editing tools and highly customizable content blocks - all on top of a modern headless architecture. With our V2 we are not only taking our unique features to the next level, but also doubling down on our promise that “Storyblok works for all developers, editors, and marketers alike”.

• Storyblok V2 is completely rebuilt using our open design system.
• Storyblok V2 has a completely new Visual Editor.
• Storyblok V2 offers a new commenting and discussion system - our goal is to bring content creation, collaboration, discussion, and management all to one central place.
• Storyblok V2 has a completely reworked Asset Manager, App Store, Block Library, and more to come later this year.
• Storyblok V2 is a faster, more accessible, and more powerful CMS.

The V2 Early Preview is meant to give you a glimpse into what is to come with our all-new CMS experience.

A closer look at the Early Preview

With our Early Preview, we are bringing some of that new experience to you and your team. But what does that mean in practical terms?

1. Visual Editor: The new visual editor goes beyond giving you a live-preview. Moving blocks between different pages is now much easier and can be done within an entry - so is navigating through your content hub and reusing/repurposing your content. You can now have a dynamic screen preview that can be manually changed to any size you may like by simply dragging a slider. You can do more with less clicks. Take a look at our V2 Visual Editor guide to see the full list of new changes.
2. Discussions: Collaborate directly in your CMS and create content together in real-time. No need to ask for feedback in Slack threads, Google Docs, or email chains. Storyblok’s new Discussions allow you to have separate threads for each single component on a page!
3. Faster experience: With the new V2 your content experience will be even faster than before - both in terms of load times and workflows.
4. More accessible: With Storyblok V2, we move forward to be more accessible for all user groups.

Why Storyblok V2?

Storyblok was launched by our two co-founders Dominik and Alex back in 2017. What started in 2015 as a prototype - and launched in 2017 as a standalone product and company - has evolved into a CMS used by more than 59,000 developers, editors, and marketers who use our technology in 93,000+ projects in 130+ countries.

In the past years, we learned a lot about content operations and how businesses organize content and create content experiences on different platforms. In addition, we still see a growing landscape of devices, channels, and digital platforms that are transforming how businesses organize their content.

Storyblok V2 is the next step of what we have always been trying to do: create the best experience for developers and business users and build better digital experiences. With Storyblok V2, we give you and your team all the tools that you need to manage your content for the world.

And with Storyblok V2 we also refactored and modernized the whole code base and introduced end-2-end tests which will make developing features in the future even faster.

As mentioned before, the early preview showcases some of the changes that are going to come with V2. Other changes will gradually roll out during the next months, such as:

• Asset Manager / DAM: A completely new way to manage your assets from a central place - complete with advanced DAM capabilities.
• App Store: A new app store built on top of Storyblok with an all-new interface
• Many more improvements to come.

The new Visual Editor and Discussions are the centerpieces of our V2 Early Preview. So let’s take a closer look.

The state of the Visual Editor

The centerpiece of our V2 Early Preview is the new Visual Editor. Building on top of our original editor, we now bring even more tools to make your editing experience easier. The great news is that everything can be done with as few clicks as possible. You never have to leave the editing preview to do anything: collaborating with your team members, looking at your block library, navigating through your content folder, and even creating new content entries!

• Browsing content: With our new Visual Editor, you can browse your content area without leaving the current page. This saves you a lot of time and is extremely helpful when you are trying to reuse content blocks, work on multiple pages simultaneously, or re-touching older content.
• Dynamic screen size: While the default screen sizes for the visual preview are still there (desktop, phone, tablet), you can now simply drag the preview screen and change the size manually to whatever you may wish.
• Flexible UI: Depending on your preferences and your specific tasks, you can easily set the Visual Editor to correspond to your needs. You can go with a minimalist editing experience, or have more options at your fingertips.

Discussions - Collaborate, right inside your CMS

Creating content isn’t a solo show in most businesses. Over the years, we’ve seen both small and big organizations utilizing Storyblok’s CMS to build great user experiences for their end clients. From small websites, to mobile apps, or Alexa skills.

Collaborating on a new landing page, blog article, or any other digital asset can be hard. Especially, when working across time zones, cultures, languages, and other potential barriers.

With our newly introduced Discussions, we believe that teams can organize content for the world, faster. Storyblok’s Discussions removes all the bad parts of collaboration and gets everyone on the same page - with the same live preview on how the real result will look like.

Think of it as Google Docs right inside your CMS. At the end of the day, we believe that all your team members should collaborate at the central content hub where your content sits. Discussions allow you to start threads at every level of a content entry, from individual nested blocks to the whole page.

Streamlining collaboration is one of out main goals. We already know that in 2021, voice and video call times during work doubled, and IM traffic simultaneously increased by 65% (Microsoft). With a centralized content hub, you can reduce wasted time hopping from one platform to the other, only to work on a single piece of content.

Roadmap

To stay up to date with the ongoing changes coming to Storyblok V2, we recommend to check our dedicated V2 progress page where you can see our public roadmap and detailed status updates for individual capabilities.. In a glance, our V2 roadmap looks like this:

How can I try V2?

Starting today, everyone with a Storyblok account can switch to V2 (and the other way around too).

• Sign up for Storyblok for free
• Log in to your account
• Click on the "Try Storyblok V2" button in the sidebar

If you prefer to switch back to Storyblok V1, in the sidebar you can see the "Back to v1" link.

Do I have to switch right now?

No.

At the moment the V2 Early Preview is there for you to try. We highly recommend that you do so, as it offers an incredibly powerful experience and enhances the V1 in every single way.

Being an early adopter means you can gradually explore all the new possibilities and not worry about sudden changes with the official V2 launch in 2022. During the Early Preview phase, you can quickly switch between V1 and V2 as you may prefer. This allows you to familiarize yourself and learn at your own pace.

Join a new galactic CMS experience

If you are already using Storyblok, just go to your Storyblok app and click on the “Try V2 Beta” at the top-right corner of your screen (while within a Story/Entry) to experience the all-new Visual Editor, Discussions, Block Library, and a couple of other improvements as part of our V2 Early Preview.

New to Storyblok? Contact us and request a demo of V2 - or simply sign up for a free trial to try the V2 Early Preview.

Finally, as we keep improving Storyblok V2, we want to hear your feedback. Please help us build a more powerful CMS by leaving your quick feedback right here. Also, we'd love to see your first experience on Twitter & Linkedin with #StoryblokBetaCrew.