Schema Week 2026 release notes, explained

Schema Week is the yearly conference of the headless CMS community. This year’s keynote packed in more releases than usual. Here they are in plain terms, with our view on each.

1. Content releases

Editors can now group changes across many documents and publish them together at a set time. Useful for product launches and price changes. We will turn this on for every client by default.

In our client work, launches often involve twenty or thirty documents: product pages, prices, navigation and banners. Until now these went live one by one, with a short window where the site was half updated. Grouped releases remove that window.

Rollback works the same way. If a release goes out with an error, the whole group returns to its previous state in one step.

2. Scheduled previews

A preview link can show the site as it will look on a future date, with all scheduled changes applied. Fewer surprises on launch morning.

Previews also work for reviewers outside the CMS. A client can open a link on a phone and see next Monday’s homepage without an account.

3. Field-level history

Every field now keeps its own change history. If a price was edited three times last week, you can see who changed it and when.

This also helps with audits. Regulated clients have asked for this for years; until now we built it ourselves with webhooks and a separate log.

4. Image focal points by default

Uploads get an automatic focal point that editors can move. Crops on mobile stop cutting off the subject.

The focal point is stored with the image, so it applies to every crop on every page that uses it.

5. Typed queries

Queries now return types the code can check at build time. For developers this removes a whole class of bugs; for editors it means fewer broken pages after a schema change.

In a test project, a renamed field produced eleven build errors that pointed to every page using it. Previously we found those pages after deploy, one bug report at a time.

The change needs a one-time update to query code. For most of our sites that is half a day of work.

6. Assisted translation

A translation panel drafts copies of a document in other languages and tracks which fields are out of date. A translator still reviews every field.

Machine drafts are marked as such until a translator confirms them. Fields change state from “draft” to “reviewed” to “out of date” when the source changes.

For bilingual sites this replaces a spreadsheet we have maintained by hand on three projects.

What to do now

Nothing urgent. Most of these arrive in your project with the next dependency update. If you want help planning releases or translations, our contact page is below.

We will write up the translation workflow in detail once we have run it on a live site for a month.

How releases interact with scheduled previews when two releases touch the same document. How field history is stored for very large datasets. What translation drafts cost at scale. We have sent these to the product team and will update this post when we have answers.

Questions we are still asking

What changes for editors

Editors will notice three things first: a Releases tab next to Documents, a history icon on every field, and a focal point marker on every image. None of these change existing workflows; they add options.

We will run a 30-minute session for each client team when the update reaches their project. Sessions are recorded for people who join later.

What changes for developers

Typed queries are the main task. Most projects need a dependency update, a regenerated type file and a pass through any query that uses projections. On our larger sites we expect one to two days per project.

Release and preview features need no code on sites that already use the standard preview setup. Two older projects use a custom preview server; we will move them to the standard setup first.

Timeline

October: typed queries and focal points on all active projects. November: releases and scheduled previews switched on, with training. December: assisted translation pilot on one bilingual site.

Projects in maintenance mode get the same updates in January, bundled with their regular dependency review.

We will post short notes here as each step lands, with what worked, what broke and how long it took. If an update causes trouble on your site, write to your project lead first; we keep a rollback ready for every change.

The full release notes from the vendor run to forty pages. This summary covers what affects the sites we maintain; the rest is either enterprise-only or still in beta.

If you run a site we built and want to know which of these apply to you, your project lead has a one-page summary per client.