Click-to-edit feature for headless CMS gives business users more direct control over front-end content changes.
Vercel has unveiled a flurry of new features and upgrades involving content editing, storage, security, and code monitoring alongside the official release of Next.js 13.4.
“In the spirit of being the end-to-end solution for building on the web, we are introducing solutions that are open, easy to use, and scale as efficiently as our front-ends,” the company said in a blog post outlining some of its latest enhancements.
Here are highlights from the most recent announcements from Vercel.
For CMS watchers, the biggest news is Visual Editing, which Vercel developed in partnership with Sanity.
In a headless CMS, Visual Editing allows business users to directly make content changes to web pages without involving a developer, filling in forms, or leaving their site.
“You can now visually edit content on your site, simplifying the editing process and allowing everyone to make edits quickly,” Greta Workman, Vercel’s Product Marketing Director, said during a streamed online keynote event.
Although early adopters of a headless tech stack lost that kind of hands-on, business user control over front-end design in their CMS, Visual Editing aims to give it back to them.
On its blog page, Vercel emphasized Visual Editing’s user-friendly, click-to-edit interface, saying it enables direct content editing by “anyone … from developers to marketing teams .. with zero code changes to your website, supporting any web framework.”
Visual Editing is still in limited private beta. Vercel is currently working on a version of it for non-headless CMSes, e-commerce systems, and content sources.
Vercel Spaces is a new set of tools giving developers greater visibility and control over workflows, build logs, collaboration, and code health.
In the streamed keynote event, Lee Robinson, Vercel’s VP of DX, said Spaces “makes sure the right people review and approve the code” with the goal of “preventing errors before they happen.”
Vercel Spaces has four main components:
Vercel says Conformance, Code Owners, and Vercel Runs are now available in early private beta for enterprise organizations, and “can be used with Vercel regardless of where you host your application.”
This is the latest iteration of Next.js since Vercel released the original version in 2016.
13.4 features an improved App Router, tweaked to be compatible with app streaming and provide enhanced support for layouts.
In the App Router, server components allow a page to be modularized into different slices that can individually ‘stream in’ relevant page components and data. This new modularity provides more flexibility in how a site’s pages can be broken into smaller chunks. Those chunks can each have their own loading indicators, and still be rendered on the server instead of in the browser.
“Content can be instantly streamed from the server, improving the perceived loading performance of a page. With (Next.js 13.4), we’ve made the App Router even more powerful, yet easy to use,” Delba Oliveira, Developer Advocate at Vercel, said during the online keynote.
According to Vercel, data fetching in the 13.4 App Router is not only much faster, it also “happens securely on the server.”
Next.js 13.4 also includes:
Vercel also announced a trio of new tools for storage:
Vercel said the three storage solutions “make it easier to fetch data from databases or other sources within the server component itself.”
Two new security features rounded out Vercel’s week of announcements:
Vercel, a cloud-based platform for front-end development, joined the MACH Alliance as a member of the ‘enabler’ category in July 2022.
Christine Wong
Senior Technology Staff Writer, Orium
I've been telling enterprise technology stories for almost three decades in print, online, and on television. I started out in journalism, covering the telecom boom, the birth of social media and the emergence of digital commerce. I'm always looking for the human angle in every technology story I write.