It’s been 6 months since we released Frontity 1.0 to the world but it feels like this happened yesterday. Seriously... time flies!

As we wind down 2019 and look forward to the new decade, we wanted to recap what brought us here andwhat we accomplished together this year, which has been a really exciting one for us.

Our Journey to Frontity Framework

The whole idea of this project really began in late 2017, when we started working with big Spanish WordPress publishers who wanted to improve the performance of their mobile sites. Despite their best efforts, their WordPress sites on mobile devices were slow and sluggish.

We got down to work and developed a mobile WordPress theme for them, called Frontity PRO. Our goal was to make this theme as performant as possible while delivering a great user experience. To achieve that, we built aninternal React framework which used the REST API to fetch the content of their WordPress sites, and spent the whole year optimizing it.

During that time, we faced a lot ofchallenges and realized that combining WordPress and React wasn’t easy at all. This combination has plenty of benefits but the ​steps necessary​ to create a working decoupled WordPress site are ​not straightforward. Good news is that after all the work, the theme was a success and it was used by more than 20 million readers!

In February of 2019 we decided to set aside the development of this theme for publishers to place all our focus onFrontity.org. We wanted to use all the acquired knowledge to launch an open source framework, so anyone facing the same challenges with WordPress and React could benefit.You can read more about our history and background in thisPost Status interview.

At that time, we were also selected to join the third edition of the Google for Startups Residency program in Spain. Being accelerated by Google and count on their support has certainly been an amazing opportunity for us this year.

2019 in Review

Many things have happened since we made that decision in February. Here are some big milestones and other great moments that shaped 2019.

Framework

• May 16, 2019:Frontity's beta version is released.
• June 6:Frontity 1.0 Release Candidate is launched. The same day, we published the Learning Frontity docs, which aim to explain all the concepts around the framework to help understand how it all works.
• June 20:Frontity 1.0 is released. This was a huge milestone for us but also for all the community, which hasn't stopped growing since then.
• July 1: we announced newimprovements like thenpx frontity info command to get environment information for debugging purposes.
• July 30: theTwenty Nineteen WordPress theme is ported over to Frontity by Imran Sayed and Smit Patadiya. We also addedsupport for CodeSandbox so that you can try Frontity directly from your browser without having to install anything.
• August 5: we created aFrontity builder for Zeit Now hosting to make the deployment process simpler.
• October 10: we released a new version of Frontity withsupport for custom post types and custom taxonomies and added thecreate-package command to our CLI.
• October 31: contributors Imran Sayed and Smit Patadiya released an external package for Frontity that addssupport for the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin.
• November 4: new Frontityimprovements are announced, native support for fonts and source maps for styled components, among others.
• December 12: we released the beta version ofFrontity’s Twenty Twenty theme port made by Segun Adebayo.

Events and sponsorships

We are proud to have contributed in different ways to WordPress and other open source communities this year.

• In 2019 we could attended both theWordCamp Europe and theWordCamp US for the first time. As usual, these were a great opportunity to learn, connect, and build meaningful relationships with members of the WordPress community.
• We sponsored theMadrid WordPress meetup, theJavaScript for WordPress Conference, and the HacktoberfestOpen Source Weekends meetup.
• We launched the firstWordPress Meetup for Devs in Madrid (which is part of the WordPress Madrid group).
• We hosted a fewworkshops atOpen Source Weekends and WordCamp Sevilla - the firstWordCamp for Developers that took place in Spain.
• The dev team participated as Teaching Assistants at WordCamp Europe and we gave atalk onSEO for headless WordPress at the JS for WP Conference.
• Other members of the team contributed with code and got involved at local WordPress meetups as speakers and volunteers.

Community

Since we launched the framework beta in May we've seen 7,120 NPM downloads and 600 stars onGitHub. In addition, more than200 members have joined thecommunity forum! ✨

We love seeing how the Frontity communitykeeps growing each day. During these months, many of you contributed to code, gave us feedback in different ways, helped answer questions about Frontity, wrote posts, made video tutorials, and helped spread the word about the framework around the globe.

So far, we have seentalks about Frontity on four different continents! Isn't it amazing? These are some of the them (if we’ve missed anything, feel free to chime in):

• Jesús Olazagoitiatalked about Frontity at the Amurrio WordPress Meetup (Spain).
• Brandon Dove gave a demo of the framework at the OC WordPress Dev Meetup (USA).
• Anna Brancogave an online talk on how to create a React theme using Frontity at the JS for WP Conference.
• Uche Jude delivered a session on headless WordPress and Frontity at DevFest Ikorodu (Nigeria).
• Imran Sayed hosted aworkshop on how to build a WordPress site with React and Frontity at WordCamp Kochi (India).

Looking Forward to 2020

We feel truly grateful for all of this and want to say, one more time, a hugethank you for being part of Frontity.

We are excited to kick off this new year and can’t wait to share with you all what's next for Frontity.

Stay tuned as we havebig news to share with you in 2020!

Happy New Year from all of us at Frontity! 🎊

This post was originally published atfrontity.org/blog.
Featured illustration is courtesy ofundraw.co.