Cloudflare Delists Perplexity + More Web Dev News

What's up everyone.

Welcome to Next in Dev a podcast where I'll talk about different topics and news all across the web dev industry.

On today's episode, I'm discussing payloads releases, Figma's IPO and Cloudflare’s drama with Perplexity and much more.

Let's start with payload.

Payload had versions 3.49 and 3.49.1 come out just recently, and 3.50 came out shortly afterwards.

Version 3.49 brought support for soft delete, a group by feature in the list view, as well as new cron scheduling features.

soft to delete safely removes documents without removing them entirely immediately.

now you can reverse deletions, whether they were accidental or on purpose.

this version preserves compatibility with drafts, autosave, and version history.

You can enable this by just setting trash to true in your collections.

This will add a deleted at time stamp, as well as a view to your collection that allows you to see the trash, and it gives you a way to query your documents based on their trash status.

Grouping documents is helpful when you want to view all of your documents within a collection by a common theme.

Things like your category.

So if you have a post collection and each post has a category, you're now able to use the group by collection option to group those collection items by that category.

Another example might be if you have authors, you can also see all of your blog authors and their content in one single view in your collection list view.

You can enable this on any collection today by simply adding the group by option to your admin options in your collection and setting it to true.

scheduling jobs adds a new schedule property when you're setting up workflows or task configs now, you can automatically queue up new jobs on a preferred cron schedule and even set it to either be manual or cron.

You'll do all of this in your jobs option in your payload config.

As I mentioned, version 3.50 was also released.

This version adds hooks to the Restore Version collection operation, trash support for the count operation, as well as a way to pass in the count true to GraphQL queries for join fields.

There's also been an Indonesian translation added to the payload translations.

Figma, Payload CMS’s parent company, went public on July 31st.

Their stock price shot up from about $33 per share, all the way up to $120 before markets closed.

Now, the stock price is about $90 per share as of the time of this recording.

In other Figma news, Figma make and AI features are out of beta, but their dev mode MCP server and Streamable Http transfer protocol are both currently still in beta development.

There have also been a bunch of updates made to Figma's design tools.

Next.js continues to backport bug fixes to version 14.2 and version 15.4.

while nothing groundbreaking has been added to these older versions, it's nice to see that Next.js is still continuing to develop on these releases, even if it's just for bug fixes.

In the Canary branch, there's been a bunch of work done for Turbo Pack, as well as caching components and MCP implementation.

Shadcn has added local file support, which allows you to initialize projects and add components and themes and more from Json files.

Now you don't need remote registries.

And you can keep proprietary components private.

This led the way to universal registry items.

You can create registry items that can be used in any project, regardless of framework, language or styling library Vercel, the maintainer of Next.js and Shadcn, has released a model control protocol or MCP server.

This MCP server allows Claude Code or your AI assistant of choice to navigate and use Vercel's documentation with ease, and it even allows you to interact with your projects on Vercel.

Speaking of Claude, Claude Opus 4.1 is now available in Vercel’s AI gateway.

So now you can develop tools using Vercel’s AI SDK and your Anthropic API key.

The infrastructure as a service platform Railway is now SOC 2 Type II compliant.

While this won't impact many businesses, this is extremely important to businesses that are highly regulated or handle sensitive data.

Think things like banks, hospitals, any kind of health care or financial services.

It's also important for those who serve those businesses as.

Railways functions, which are similar to Cloudflare’s workers, are now supported in the Railway CLI tools.

railways.

CLI tools have always been top tier.

So this is just another welcome addition to the tool.

Cloudflare announced on August 4th that they detected stealth crawlers from Perplexity AI.

This means that Perplexity was allegedly trying to evade people's no crawl directives to gain more information for their answer engine.

According to Cloudflare, Perplexity would crawl sites until they got a block, and then Perplexity would change an IP address or change the user agent of their crawler in order to try and bypass that block.

Because of this behavior, Cloudflare has delisted Perplexity as a verified bot and is now attempting to block these stealth crawlers.

And this is about as dramatic as it gets in web development.

Perplexity.

Acting in bad faith gets delisted by Cloudflare, which by default now requires that content creators and site owners get paid for when an AI crawler hits their site.

Cloudflare, in my opinion, is not free from critique here, though.

This is a pretty heavy handed response that they could just hand out to anybody that they disagree with.

And that could hinder innovation.

There's a thin line, in my opinion, between protecting content and attempting to police the internet.

Let me know in the comments where you stand in this argument.

There's always so much happening in modern web development, so I'm bound to have missed something.

So what did I miss?

Leave a comment, a question or a suggestion for a topic for me to cover for the next one?

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But until then, I'll see you on the next one.