Strapi Custom Development
Possibilities, Trade-offs, and Examples

Out of the box, Strapi enables teams to get started quickly with their CMS needs. But most real-world projects need to customize their Strapi setup to solve their specific requirements. Check out what you can customize, what to watch out for, and some customization examples from actual projects.

Strapi Custom Development - Possibilities and Considerations

Strapi CMS Customization - What's Possible

Customize or Create APIs for Frontend and Admin

Control what your APIs expose, how they behave, and who can access them.

Add custom logic to REST or GraphQL endpoints using policies, middleware or controllers (e.g., ensure the /orders/ endpoint returns only the current user's orders).
Create new APIs for frontend use or to support custom admin features (e.g., build /admin/reports/daily/ endpoint for daily summaries).

Integrate with External Services or In-House Systems

Connect Strapi CMS to the tools already in use by your team.

Integrate with storage (AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage), email services (Resend, AWS SES), search systems (Elasticsearch, Meilisearch) through plugins (e.g., send newsletter through AWS SES directly from Strapi).
Use custom plugins or webhooks to integrate with internal tools, legacy platforms, or proprietary APIs (e.g., receive data from CRM using Strapi webhooks).

Extend or Customize Admin Panel

Make the editing interface work for your team.

Add field types like map coordinates, date ranges or color pickers using community or custom plugins.
Customize admin screens and workflows by extending or overriding Strapi's admin code (e.g., modify the admin panel to align with your content review process).

Trigger Custom Actions on Content Changes or Schedules

Automate tasks and workflows as per your content lifecycle.

Use lifecycle hooks to run logic when content is modified (e.g., send an alert when product stock hits 0).
Schedule background tasks with Strapi cron jobs (e.g., reindex content for search every hour).

Support Your Frontend Needs

Have a content setup where the frontend and backend work in harmony.

Enable draft previews on your frontend with Strapi's draft/publish mode. Invalidate frontend cache on publish via lifecycle hooks (e.g., invalidate cache when content is published).
Generate OpenAPI schemas for your frontend to make API calls typesafe (e.g., use the documentation plugin to generate API typings).

Key Considerations for Strapi Custom Development

Security and Performance

Strapi is fast and secure out of the box. But, poorly written custom code can unintentionally expose data or introduce slowness in APIs or admin panel. For example:

A poorly written access control middleware can degrade API performance.
Custom APIs may unintentionally expose data from related collections.

When building custom logic, test not just for functionality, but also for performance and access control.

Upgrade Compatibility

Custom code might break during Strapi version upgrades, especially when it relies on internal APIs or overrides core admin components. This can make upgrades more time-consuming and error-prone. Reduce this risk by following customization best practices like:

Use Strapi's Document Service API instead of querying the tables directly.
Prefer middleware over lifecycle hooks.
Add unit tests for critical customizations to catch regressions early during upgrades.

Dev Time and Cost

Strapi custom development ranges from a few lines of middleware changes to complex plugins. Some features may not justify the build effort.

Evaluate the customization benefit against development time and cost.
Before building from scratch, check if an existing plugin already meets your needs.

Examples from Real Projects

Integrated ElasticSearch with Strapi

To enable a fast, site-wide content search, we built a custom /search API powered by ElasticSearch. This required a Strapi plugin that:

Indexed content updates to Elasticsearch.
Handled frontend search queries via a custom route.

Specifics like mapping configuration, indexing strategy, etc. for this integration are documented in this blog post for those looking for implementation specifics.

Enhanced Collections Filtering in the Admin Panel

With over 100 collections and single types, filtering content became painful for the content teams. We addressed this by:

Overriding the specific admin panel component to enhance filtering.
Setting up a build and deploy mechanism to apply the override reliably.

Implementation particulars about handling the override complications are mentioned here for those looking to override the admin features.

Custom Input Validations for the Admin UI Fields

We needed custom validation rules for certain fields (e.g., currency conversion rates). This was implemented by:

Using global middleware to reuse custom validation logic across collections.
Centralizing input validation logic and error messages in one maintainable file.

Evaluation of the alternate implementation approaches is detailed in this post for those looking for more details.

Need a Strapi developer who's done it before?

I'm Punit Sethi, an independent Strapi expert.

Back in 2021, I was brought in to fix a client's in-house CMS. Though I started as their frontend architect, I ended up evaluating CMS frameworks and chose Strapi for its flexibility. That implementation kicked off my deep dive into Strapi.

Since then, I have implemented Strapi customizations, upgrades and migrations for multiple organizations.

If you are looking for someone with deep Strapi expertise, feel free to reach out.

Email : punit@tezify.com - I'm happy to chat about your use case.

Let's talk about your Strapi project →

Strapi Custom DevelopmentPossibilities, Trade-offs, and Examples