Recap 2018 – Check out last year's projects and highlights

Another year has come to an end! 2018 was a great year for YOOtheme Pro, and we thank you for that! Now, as usual, we would like to begin a new year by looking back at everything that has happened and taking a sneak peek on what we have planned for this year.

YOOtheme Relaunch

In 2018, we finally relaunched our website, the third time in history of YOOtheme. As expected, this was a tremendous task since we redesigned and reworked every part of the YOOtheme online platform. From the home, product and demo pages, to a new support, account and answers system, we improved everything. The YOOtheme Pro documentation was also completely rewritten with over 40 documentation pages. We even produced a promotion clip for YOOtheme Pro! If you haven't seen it yet, check it out on our YouTube channel.

We are really proud of our new site, and we are looking forward to having the full focus on our products in 2019!

YOOtheme Pro

Last year our focus was again on YOOtheme Pro, which is becoming more and more powerful. 2018 we had 7 feature and 8 content releases for YOOtheme Pro. This means we added 65 new layouts and 48 styles to our libraries.

The feature releases focused on 3 areas. Firstly, we boosted YOOtheme Pro's loading times with lazy loading images and videos, locally hosted Google Fonts, WebP images and much more, which all leads to a higher Google PageSpeed ranking.

Secondly, we added many improvements to the customizer user interface and introduced new features like the Slider element, the Masonry Grid with the Filter option, integration of the Unsplash image library, a new Footer library and more.

And thirdly, we steadily improved the software architecture of YOOtheme Pro. For example, we completely refactored the JavaScript application behind YOOtheme Pro and upgraded it to the latest version of the Vue.js. We also implemented the concept of a render tree into the page builder architecture and refactored element file structure and all its templates. This work is the ground-base of many long-awaited features we are now going to work on in 2019.

UIkit 3

We feature-completed UIkit 3 in spring 2018 by adding the missing Slider, Masonry, Filter components from UIkit 2 as well as a new Image component to lazy load images and speed up page loading times. Altogether we published 32 UIkit releases, and after some minor releases and fixes in the second half of the year, we finally released the UIkit 3.0 Stable version.

The UIkit npm package has now over 15,000 weekly downloads! Thank you ❤️ UIkit community!

Our themes in 2018

What can be expected this year?

Now that we had a small recap of what 2018 brought us, let's see what we have planned for you this year. The first half of 2019 our main focus will be on YOOtheme Pro again. Thanks to the latest improvements of the page builder architecture, we are now working on one of the most anticipated features: dynamic content, formerly known as content providers. That's not all, our main goal is to get YOOtheme Pro nearly feature-complete.

There were just minor UIkit releases lately, but that doesn't mean development has slowed down... We are happy to announce that we already made plans for UIkit 4, and parts of it are in the works as we speak. We hope to have UIkit 4 ready in the middle of the year. We will have more news about it in spring.

In our recap 2018 blog post we wrote that we would integrate Widgetkit and ZOO with YOOtheme Pro and UIkit 3. But it turned out that nowadays the development life cycle of our products takes much more time than in the past. Technology is changing very fast, and since we have a high quality standard, the development in general moves forward slower than we originally expected.

However, we have some great news for you. We are officially working on ZOO 4! 🥳 We got help from Miljan, one of the ZOOlanders lead developers, who is joining us to work on ZOO 4.

We got many questions from the Pagekit community about why the Pagekit development is stuck. As mentioned before, the reason is the lack of time for the development. We will still continue to maintain Pagekit and fix smaller issues like we did last year. But there is no major release planned for 2019. If you are interested in helping the Pagekit development like updating it to the latest Vue version, just get in touch with us. Any help is much appreciated!

By the way, do you know YOOtheme is hiring? Currently, we are looking for full-time web designers, front-end developers and support engineers in our office in Hamburg. So if you would like to become part of our team, send us your application.

We would especially like to thank you for another great year. None of this would be possible without your support and feedback. We wish you an exciting and successful year!

Your YOOtheme Team