# DatoCMS Product Roundup: The Big Summer Changelog

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## Email content

We been cooking at DatoCMS

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DatoCMS Product Roundup

👋 John,

Been a hot minute (literally) since the last product roundup, and as promised, the summer's been a busy time for us while we focused on TONS of tweaks, improvements, and general enhancements, rather than shipping out big juicy features. BUT a lot of that's still relevant to all of you, so here we gooo👀ooo.

The Real-time API is now genuinely real-time. Before, you'd have to wait 1.5-2.5s to see your changes reflected, which wasn't very real-time. This has now been reduced to 100-500ms, which is very much real-time-er.

We've deprecated custom colour palettes in favour of built-in themes for projects created after 25 Aug, 2026 for more visual consistency and accessibility on the UI.

There's a new plugin very much in beta that gives you an AI assistant inside the CMS - say hello to the DatoCMS Agent. It reaches your project through the MCP so it can do a bunch of things in the CMS for you. It is in an early Beta phase, so if you'd like to use it, we'd LOVE to get your feedback on it.

The Automatic Environment Backups plugin got a fresh new guided wizard to make sure you set it up correctly, as well as a live status overview with a progress timeline and a "Backup Now" button.

The Alt Text AI Plugin now lets you pick your fave AI. Till now, it used the AltText.ai service, but now you can hook it up to ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini as your Alt Text generation providers.

Oh, and speaking of plugins, official plugins (created by the team) now have a fancy new "Official Plugin" badge so its' easier to identify as one that's maintained by us (and so you know who to blame in case something isn't working just right).

Visual Editing ALSO works in Sidebar Previews now, just btw. AND you can give specific fields an opt-out from Visual Editing if you want to keep the page itself editable except for a field here and there. Oh, and If you're using the Visual Editing plugin in the CMS, you can now create new records straight from the visual editor too.

It is also possible to search for a record by ID. In the past you needed the API for this, now, you can simply enter a record ID in the UI Search Bar and you'll get the results!

While we're on the search topic, it's also relevant to know that you can now filter records by who created them from the UI with the new _creator filter.

You can also easily navigate the new Record Sidebar where we've introduced tabs to switch between sidebar plugins. goodbye "Info ▾" dropdown.

There's also an all-new All Records Viewer plugin that lists out all records across models with customizable columns in a spreadsheet view, and a Centra Product Picker plugin for all y'all working with Centra in your eCommerce stack.

If you're on a paid plan, the CMS now warns you before you do any actions that'll cost you. Things like adding environments, which cost, come with a prompt to let you confirm you've acknowledged the said action will reflect on your bill so there's no surprises.

And aside from all of this - a huge chunk of security and performance updates that don't have a changelog/link attached, but should make your overall CMS experience smoother, as well as lots of changes and improvements to the docs (special mention to the all new cache tags docs with a new Astro guide, and the conversion of the Remix guides into the React Router guides) in general.

In other non-CMS news, us non-devs were a little busy too.

Some of you weren't too sure of when to use the MCP vs. when to use Agent Skills, so I wrote a little blog post about it (spoiler, I'm lazy, I use both together 🫥)

I also had the most INCREDIBLE chat with Laís from goodbase, where she walked me though "the aesthetics of a lighter internet" in the context of their work with ClimateAdaptation.life. We talked about design philosophy, constraints, Dato, sustainability, and so much more. This was a really fun chat.

And to wrap things up, as usual, join me in giving our brand new partners a big 👋 as we welcome App bis Web 🇩🇪, room for speculation 🇳🇱, 5874 Commerce 🇬🇧, Heart 🇨🇭, and Commerce Engine 🇮🇳 into the DatoCMS Partner Ecosystem.

PS: If you're an agency, what're you waiting for? Join the partner network so our bearded wizard Matteo 🧙 can guide you though implementing projects better.

‼️ PPS: HEADS UP - we have a planned database maintenance window published for 19 September 2026, during which projects go into read-only mode for a bit!

That's it for now. I'll see you in the next one.

✌️

Picture of Alessio

🫶🏽 Ronak from DatoCMS

@ me on X or LinkedIn if you'd like to chat

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DatoCMS

Via U. Visconti di Modrone 2, 20122, Milano, Italy

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