“init, just some testing” — a look back at the past year

Today, April 22nd, 2014, marks an entire year since Andrew committed the first lines of code into the NodeBB codebase.

We’ve had an incredible year, celebrating mini-milestones like getting our first star outside the three of us (we’re vain like that), or getting our first pull request, and I can say beyond the shadow of a doubt that we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are today without our dedicated community of users, plugin writers, and theme designers.

Beyond the development of the codebase is an entire network of individuals on our support forum, FreeNode #nodebb, and issue tracker constantly providing us with feedback, criticisms, and suggestions for improvement.

Today we also unveil our new website revamp complete with new branding. Many thanks to our informal designer and one of our earliest adopters, Trevor Williams, creator of convoe.com.

Some fun (and cringeworthy) facts:

• In the first commit, the working title of the repository was "nodeforum". How terribly creative are we?
• We had no idea that error-first was the norm in Node. We thought it was awkward and wrote a Redis wrapper just so we didn’t have to deal with handling the err argument in the callback
• We checked in node_modules

So where exactly have we gone in 365 days?

• NodeBB has gone from v0.0.1 to v0.4.1, with v0.4.2 right around the corner
• We have a base of over 60 plugins available
• 9 themes have been made
• NodeBB has been translated into 27 languages
• Our premium hosted platform has been open to the general public as of January 2014
• We’ve made several appearances at local developer conferences, and have had the privilege of being a guest speaker for GhostTalk Episode 6

Awesome.

What about the next 365?

• We’re hoping to finish up and release a dedicated plugin repository to properly manage things like version mismatches and update notifications
• We’d like to get a category on ThemeForest in order to really showcase all of the themes

If you can (or know somebody who can) make this a reality, get in touch with us at sales@nodebb.org!

NodeBB is the first large scale open source project that any of us have been involved with. And if you had followed our first couple months of development it was totally clear that none of us have ever coded in Node.js before.

Yes, I’ll put my hand up and admit that I had read about the first 1.5 paragraphs of the Redis documentation late on a Friday night and went "YES. I’m going to build a forum with this knowledge! How do I install Node.js?"

The past 365 days has been a great learning experience for the three of us. I’m really grateful to all our entire community who have been helpful with feedback, pull requests, and yes, even trolling – it’s all been for the best! 🙂

Andrew Rodrigues

So it’s been one year already? Time flies indeed.

I joined Andrew and Julian about one month after they started working on NodeBB and since then I have been working on adding new features and re-factoring what was already there (sorry guys!). Although we have accomplished a lot in a year there is still much to be done.

I would also like to thank everyone who has contributed to NodeBB by making a PR, bug report, plugin, translation. I would also like to thank those who started using NodeBB
as early as our 0.0.x releases, your feedback really matters to us! Keep it coming!

Thanks all!

Baris Usakli

The coolest part about working with NodeBB is the satisfaction I get out of developing something used by so many people around the world. I love being able to incrementally see NodeBB getting better, commit after commit, and to be able to speak one-on-one with the administrators running our code on the production level, offering feedback and even sometimes fixes to our implementation.

Our earliest adopters are definitely to be commended, having to put up with us refactoring left, right, and centre, and sticking with us throughout it all. Thanks for your support and feedback, we couldn’t have done it without you!

Julian Lam

… and lastly

The core development team is always open to customisations and contracted development of plugins and themes. If you are or know somebody looking for a customised NodeBB, please contact us at sales@nodebb.org!

• Commissioned Themes
• Custom Plugins
• One-on-one consultation
• Remote NodeBB installation

Thanks for a great year, and here’s to another!

Sincerely,
The NodeBB Team