2015 - Year in Review
As an eventful year for Craft comes to a close, I personally see 2015 as the year CraftEntries finally gained real momentum.
This article is over 10 years old. Features and approaches described here may have changed since.
The idea began in 2014. After some thought, I settled on the name CraftEntries because entries are the main content type in Craft, and the name is also a play on words about joining the Craft world. Brandon Kelly liked it and gave his approval. On April 20, 2014, I registered craftentries.de with a clear goal: to make Craft CMS more accessible to German-speaking users.
The original plan was to launch in fall 2014, but client work and some unanswered questions delayed things. In January 2015, I put an early beta online with just the link collection, even though there were still some technical problems. Ben Parizek from Straight Up Craft encouraged me to launch anyway and let the site grow over time, just like he did with his own site.
In October 2015, I launched the Crafter section to introduce German-speaking Craft users. What began as a small archive is slowly coming together.
"Link collection" doesn't really describe it. Back then, these were editorial news articles in German, with my own commentary and context. Now, the links are just a headline and a URL, but there used to be a lot more effort behind each one.
The State of Craft: End-of-2015 Edition
Yesterday, Brandon Kelly of Pixel & Tonic published a year in review. The highlights:
- Over 12,000 Craft installations on public domains
- Companies like Associated Press, Canon, Intel, Netflix, Salesforce, and Wired are now using Craft
- The Craft 3 Dev Preview launched in May
- Craft Commerce 1.0 and Craft CMS 2.5 were released on December 1
- Benjamin David and Luke Holder joined as developers
- Revenue was up more than 40% over the previous year
We’re thrilled with how far our little CMS has come, and we’re excited about what the future holds. But none of this could happen without the amazing Craft community - you folks make this whole thing fun, and for that we are eternally grateful. So thank you for being awesome!
What's next?
Pixel & Tonic plans to release Craft CMS 2.6 and Commerce 1.1 in the next few months. Work on Craft 3 is starting up again, with the aim of launching a public beta, though there's no timeline yet.
My take
2015 was a year of growth for Craft, with more users, a bigger team, and new products. Craft Commerce opened up a new market, and Craft 3 is slowly coming together. For CraftEntries, it was finally the year to get started after more than a year of preparation. Sometimes things just take longer than you expect.
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