Frontity 2020: A Year in Review

Here we are at the end of 2020, and what a year it's been!

Despite the circumstances and the challenges that we've all faced over recent months, we feel lucky that our work hasn't been negatively impacted by the pandemic.

2020 has actually been an exciting and busy year for Frontity. We're proud of what we and Frontity's amazing community have accomplished so far. Before the New Year, we wanted to take a look back over some of our biggest updates and the milestones that shaped 2020 for us. Let's get into them!

Framework updates

Over the course of the last year we've shipped more than 20 releases.

To start the year we rolled out the 1.0 version of the Twenty Twenty Frontity Theme, with pagination, proper status codes, and other CSS improvements.

Apart from addressing many other improvements we also continued to make adding functionality to your Frontity projects easier by releasing different packages and features, including:

• Frontity Yoast Package, which adds support for the REST API output of Yoast SEO plugin (14.0 or newest versions).
• WordPress Comments Package, to support native WordPress comments.
• First beta version of both the Google Ad Manager Package and the Smart AdServer Package, both of which allow you to integrate ads from these servers with Frontity really easily.
• New <Link> component and the auto-prefetch feature to easily speed up navigation (a huge thank you to @nicholasio for this contribution!).
• Analytics Packages, to add Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Comscore to your Frontity projects.
• Beta version of the infinite scroll feature (thanks to @orballo for his work and improvements on this hook!).
• A Slot component which can be used to fulfil the "Slot and Fill" pattern.
• A Switch component to improve the routing between pages.
• REST API - Head Tags Plugin and Package, to add the meta tags generated by some of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins to the REST API output and get automatically all the data in Frontity.

As part of the upcoming Frontity PHP plugin, we also created a Proof of Concept of the Frontity Embedded Mode with post preview support. This offers a new way to use WordPress and Frontity together under the same domain by embedding the React theme. By using this mode, you don't have to worry about all those things which are difficult to replicate in a traditional headless setup (like instant cache invalidation, CORS, or redirections, among many other benefits).

In addition, we released new guides and demos, improved the documentation, and we also introduced Frontity Talks. Frontity Talks is a series of videos created by our DevRel team to demonstrate and explain a variety of different topics related to Frontity.

Last but not least, we launched a brand new frontity.org website this year. Built with Gutenberg and Frontity, this was a great opportunity for us to learn more about the new WordPress editor and leverage its strengths. Mario, our Product Manager, recently published this blog post in order to share the process we followed and all the things we learned from the experience.

We've got some exciting things planned for 2021. There are already some features on the horizon, such as server extensibility, version 2.0 of the source package, and Frontity hooks, all of which will bring significant developer experience improvements. We'll be following up with our roadmap for the coming months soon!

Thank you for contributing code, helping improve the documentation, giving us feedback, helping answer questions in the community, or simply for just using the framework. This has enabled much of the progress we've made this year.

Company updates

In April, we announced a €1M funding round with Automattic and K Fund. Frontity was born around the idea of building great web experiences with WordPress and React easily. Getting financial backing has allowed us to invest more effort in helping deliver on our mission, and make the project sustainable.

We also started to collaborate with a number of WordPress hosting companies to make it easier to deploy your Frontity websites on your preferred hosting platform. Pantheon's new Decoupled Bridge is a good example in this direction. Here's a quick demo of how this solution works with Frontity.

In October, we launched a partnership program to collaborate and join forces with various WordPress agencies. 10up, one of the largest WordPress-centric agencies in the world, was the first partner to join in. We can't wait to do more together!

To end the year, Frontity was featured in Runa Capital's ROSS Index as one of the fastest-growing open-source startups for Q3 2020.

Community

In the last year, we've seen more than 40,000 NPM downloads and 1200 stars on GitHub. Also, more than 500 members have joined the community forum.

You have built some beautiful Frontity starter themes, including:

• F1 Starter Theme (by AWSM)
• Frontity Starter Theme (by Alexandra Spalato)
• Frontity Dimension Theme (by Mathieu Mencé)
• Frontity Chakra Theme (by Segun Adebayo)

And also many, many other awesome projects!

The Showcase Page includes examples from big online publications such as Aleteia and Diariomotor to personal projects. Go check them out if you haven't yet!

But that's not all. During the last 12 months, you have written blog posts and guides, made video tutorials, and helped spread the word about the framework around the globe.

So far we have seen talks about Frontity in six different countries! We're grateful for all these amazing contributions from the community. Please keep them coming! 🙌

Our team also had the chance to get involved in online gatherings with the WordPress community and with other open-source communities this year. Because of the growth of online events, we could attend and speak at many local meetups and conferences from around the world, including WordCamp Europe, JSNation Live, WordCamp Los Angeles, and WordCamp Colombia.

We gave 14 talks, hosted 2 workshops, and supported the JavaScript for WordPress Conference and JSNation Live as sponsors.

Looking Forward to 2021

We couldn't have done all this without you helping us out in such a multitude of ways. Thank you so much for being part of Frontity and for all your support over the past year. 💙

We are excited to be kicking off a new year and can't wait to share with you all that we have planned for it!

Happy New Year from all of us at Frontity! See you in 2021!