Recap 2016 – Check out last year's projects and highlights
Happy new year everyone! We hope you had enjoyable holidays and a good start into 2017. As always, we would like to begin the year by looking back at the past twelve months and review what has happened in the world of YOOtheme, the goals we achieved and what is to come in the near future. It has been quite a year! The Pagekit 1.0 release in spring was the first big milestone of 2016 for us and the second one came in autumn with the launch of YOOtheme Pro.
Pagekit 1.0
2016 was an incredible year for Pagekit. The 1.0 release in March marked a tremendous step for our Open Source CMS. With 3.900+ Stargazers on GitHub Pagekit made it to third place in the list of most popular PHP CMS. Altogether, Pagekit has 80.000+ downloads and 25.000+ registered users at pagekit.com. Thanks to our steadily growing community Pagekit won the Best New CMS category of the CMS Critic Awards. Thank you! We are also very proud of being the biggest (only?) PHP CMS whose admin area is entirely built with Vue.js, currently the most hyped JavaScript framework.
YOOtheme Pro
In October, after almost one year of development, we released YOOtheme Pro. It's the biggest step in our history of creating themes and the beginning of a new era that merges our products into a single, groundbreaking website builder. It allows you to customize and manage pretty much every aspect of your website: Theme settings like header, menu and module layouts, the look of your website through a sophisticated style customizer and even your unique, custom pages, which you can create via drag and drop by using the page builder and its comprehensive element and layout library. Thanks to the modularity of YOOtheme Pro, you will constantly get new theme features, new page layouts, ready-to-use elements and beautiful style variations - all through 1-click updates.
Together with UIkit 3, YOOtheme Pro also marks a break in our product line. Both are built completely new. Everything is modernized, improved, rethought. This is why both are in their early stages feature-wise. There are great things to come this year :-)
UIkit 3
Exactly one year ago we started to rework UIkit 2, and it was just some weeks ago that we released UIkit 3 Beta. With over 1.000.000+ downloads alone on GitHub, we are very proud that it has become one of the most popular front-end frameworks for the web. Although the current status of UIkit 3 is still beta, you can consider the code base stable. There are just some advanced components missing from UIkit 2 which will be reworked soon. We launched the new UIkit 3 website with a comprehensive documentation, and it already powers YOOtheme Pro and all our current website releases.
Talks and team
In May, we presented Pagekit in a talk at JandBeyond in Barcelona. Thank you for having us and for all the fun conversations. We really enjoyed the time with you guys and hope to see you again this year in Krakow. In June, we joined the WordCamp Europe for the first time. It was held in wonderful Vienna, and we took the chance and joined the Camp with the whole team. The huge event took place in the midst of the historical MuseumsQuartier and was a great occasion for us to get in touch with WordPress enthusiasts and attend interesting talks. In late summer we had our first Pagekit Meetup and later a Joomla User Group Meetup on YOOtheme Pro, which gave us the chance to get to know some of our users, receive useful feedback and to answer their questions. More gatherings are planned for this year.
Our themes in 2016
What can be expected this year?
As YOOtheme's ten year anniversary is coming up, this is really an important year for us. Our main focus will be on YOOtheme Pro, our website builder. We will add the missing components like the slideshow to UIkit and integrate it into YOOtheme Pro, together with all the features you love from Widgetkit. Pagekit support is also on the to-do list. And we have some aces up our sleeves that we are really excited about, too.
YOOtheme is still looking for talented designers and developers to join the team. If you're looking for new challenges, send us your application. We would love to get to know you!
Developing and releasing projects is one thing, but the other and probably most important part in a project's success is the community. We want to thank YOU, our community, for all the contribution and suggestions you're giving us every day. Your support encourages and motivates us and your feedback helps us improve our ideas and projects.
As you can see, a lot happened in 2016. Thank you for taking part in it with us. We hope you will have a great, exciting and successful new year.
Cheers on 2017!
Your YOOtheme Team
