# Strapi v5.61.0 — Release & Upgrade Intelligence
- **Product:** Strapi (https://strapi.io)
- **Version:** v5.61.0
- **Released:** Nov 04, 2026
- **Impact Score:** 8/10
- **Breaking Changes:** Not verified
- **Canonical Analysis:** https://changelogs.us/strapi/updates/v5.61.0/

## Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Strapi v5.61.0 introduces new audit log events, significant admin and content-manager performance enhancements, and drops support for Node 20. Teams must verify their deployment environments run Node 22 or higher before upgrading.

## New Features
- audit-logs: record history restores, discarded drafts, settings updates and media events
- upload: new asset picker and image drop in the rich text editors
- upload: content manager asset details drawer

## Improvements
- admin: only re-render context consumers whose selected value changed
- content-manager: build the document validation schema once, when it is needed
- content-manager: render edit view rows progressively
- content-manager: only fetch relations of fields near the viewport

## Bug Fixes
- admin: add missing english keys and french translations
- content-manager: history version restore answers 500 for an unknown version id
- content-manager: relations return 500 instead of 403 on field read denial
- core: required fields of a new component are not enforced on update